Valerie Kinloch, dean of the School of Education at the U. of Pittsburgh, has been named president of Johnson C. Smith U.
CHIEF EXECUTIVES Appointments Michael Bernstein,former provost and senior vice president for academic affairs and interim president of Stony Brook University, has been named interim president of the College of New Jersey.
Deborah Casey,vice president for student affairs at Green River College, in Washington, has been named president of Wor-Wic Community College, in Maryland.
Christopher Davis,a member of the Board of Trustees for LeMoyne-Owen College, has been named interim president. He replaces Vernell A. Bennett-Fairs, who has resigned.
Kristine Dillon, a senior adviser for higher education at Huron Consulting and a former member of the Board of Trustees at Whittier College, has been named interim president of Whittier College.
Amanuel Gebru,vice president for instruction at Moorpark College, has been named president of Los Angeles City College.
Kayla Hale,vice president for university advancement and alumni engagement at the University of Tulsa, has been named president of the University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma.
Tony Hawkins,provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, continuing education, and work-force development at Frederick Community College, in Maryland, has been named president of the State University of New York Broome Community College.
Stacia Haynie, a professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and former executive vice president and provost at Louisiana State University, has been named the sole finalist for president of Midwestern State University.
Valerie Kinloch,dean of the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, has been named president of Johnson C. Smith University.
Julie Kornfeld,vice provost for academic programs at Columbia University, will become president of Kenyon College, in Ohio, in October.
Lester Edgardo Sandres Rápalo,provost and vice president for academic affairs at the City University of New York Bronx Community College, has been named president of Rockland Community College.
Mary Evans Sias,a member of the Board of Regents for Texas Southern University, has been named interim president of the university.
Resignations Ty Stone,president of Cleveland State Community College, has resigned after a year in the role.
Retirements Carol Christ,chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley since 2017, plans to retire next year.
Marc Nigliazzo,president of Texas A&M University-Central Texas, will retire on August 31.
Kevin Satterlee, president of Idaho State University, will retire at the end of this calendar year.
J. Scott Angle
CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICERS Appointments J. Scott Angle,senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the University of Florida, has been named interim provost.
Prabu David,vice provost for faculty and academic staff development, interim vice provost for teaching and learning innovation, and dean of the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, has been named provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Ana Hunt, interim provost and former interim chancellor of the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College, has been named provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs.
Leamor Kahanov,provost and vice president for academic affairs and chief academic officer at Stockton University, has been named senior vice president and provost at Alvernia University.
Joan Saab,a professor of art history and executive vice provost for academic affairs at the University of Rochester, has been named executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Richmond.
Pamela E. Scott-Johnson,provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Monmouth University, has been named provost at Spelman College.
Resignations Alicia Bertone,provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, has stepped down.
Retirements Chuck Taber,provost and executive vice president at Kansas State University, will retire at the end of the 2023 fall semester.
OTHER TOP ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Nicole Albo-Lopez, interim vice chancellor for educational programs and institutional effectiveness for the Los Angeles Community College District, has been named to the post permanently.
Shantay Bolton,executive vice chancellor for administration and chief administrative officer at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named executive vice president for administration and finance and chief business officer at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Dedric Carter,vice chancellor and chief commercialization officer and a professor of practice in the McKelvey School of Engineering and Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named vice chancellor for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development and chief innovation officer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Joel Curran,vice president for public affairs and communications at the University of Notre Dame, has been named senior vice president and chief communications officer at the University of Southern California.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research and a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, has been named senior adviser to the president for academic excellence and associate provost at the University of Florida.
Geraldine Sullivan,associate vice president for human resources in the School of Medicine at Yale University, has been named chief human resources officer at the University of Richmond.
Resignations Phyllis Carter,associate vice chancellor and chief financial officer for the Contra Costa Community College District, in California, has resigned after being placed on administrative leave.
DEANS Appointments Bruce W. Berdanier, dean of the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering at South Dakota State University, has been named dean of the College of Engineering and Sciences at Purdue University Northwest.
Cathy J. Bradley, associate dean of research at the Colorado School of Public Health and deputy director of the University of Colorado Cancer Center at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, has been named dean of the School of Public Health.
Stephanie B. Caulder
Stephanie B. Caulder,dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Radford University, in Virginia, has been named founding dean of the College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Steven Dubinett,who has served as the interim dean of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles since 2021, has been named to the post permanently.
Melissa Falk,dean of admission and financial aid at Muhlenberg College, has been named associate vice president and dean of admission at the University of Richmond.
Roland Faller,executive associate dean in the College of Engineering at the University of California at Davis, has been named dean of the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering at Texas Tech University.
Mary Margaret Frank,senior associate dean of faculty development at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, has been named dean of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
José García-León,dean of academic affairs and assessment at the Juilliard School, in New York, has been named dean of the School of Music at Yale University.
Bertie Greer,associate dean of the Mike Ilitch School of Business at Wayne State University, has been named dean of the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.
Marcus Hayes,a professor and chair of the department of theater and dance at Austin Peay State University, in Tennessee, has been named dean of the new Creative School at DePauw University, in Indiana.
Michelle Jackson,associate dean of academic affairs at Broward College, has been named dean of liberal arts at Wake Tech Community College.
Ashish K. Jhawill return to his post as dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University after serving as White House COVID-19 response coordinator.
Barbara Jones, associate dean of health affairs in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and chair of the department of health social work in the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, has been named dean of the School of Social Work at Boston University.
Deanna Kennedy,associate dean of academics in the School of Business at the University of Washington at Bothell, has been named dean of the College of Business and Economics at Western Washington University.
Anuj Mehrotra, dean of the School of Business at George Washington University, has been named chair and dean of the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Sam Panarella, a professor of law and executive director of the Max Baucus Institute at the University of Montana, has been named dean of the School of Law at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Ah-Hyung (Alissa) Park, a professor of climate change and chair of the department of earth and environmental engineering at Columbia University, has been named dean of the Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Christopher Schuh,a professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University.
Monika Williams Shealey,senior vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Rowan University, has been named dean of the College of Education and Human Development at Temple University.
Cameron B. Wesson,a professor of anthropology and special adviser to the president at Franklin & Marshall College, has been named dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at La Salle University.
Heather Woofter
Heather Woofter,director of the College of Architecture and the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.
OTHER ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Derrick Brooms,associate department head of Africana studies and a professor of Africana studies and sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has been named executive director of the Black Men’s Research Institute at Morehouse College.
Brittini Brown,associate vice president for student affairs at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, has been named associate vice provost for student engagement and dean of students at the Johns Hopkins University.
Leah P. Hollis,a faculty member in the department of advanced studies, leadership, and policy at Morgan State University, has been named associate dean of access, equity, and inclusion in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University.
Anthony Abraham Jack,a sociologist and assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University, has been named an associate professor of higher-education leadership in the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University and faculty director of its Newbury Center.
Tiffany Mfume,associate vice president for student success and retention at Morgan State University, has been named associate vice provost for student success and retention initiatives at the Johns Hopkins University.
Jacqueline M. Reese,associate director of student-access services at Emory University, has been named ombuds at Bowdoin College.
Retirements Alice Griffin, director of curriculum review and program assessment at the University of Arkansas, retired on June 30 after almost 20 years at the university.
Jodi Koste,university archivist and senior curator for health sciences in the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, has retired.
DEATHS David M. Bartley,a former president of Holyoke Community College, in Massachusetts, died on June 13. He was 88.
David Calleo,a professor emeritus of European and Eurasian studies at the Johns Hopkins University, died on June 15. He was 88. Calleo also taught at Brown and Yale Universities.
John B. Goodenough, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, died on June 25. He was 100. Goodenough is known for the development of the lithium-ion battery and received the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Harry M. Markowitz,a professor of finance in the Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego, died on June 22. He was 95. Markowitz received the 1990 Nobel Prize in economic science, shared with Merton H. Miller and William F. Sharpe, while he was a professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York.
Henry Petroski,a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Duke University, died on June 14. He was 81.
Catherine Pope, associate vice chancellor for strategic operations and planning at the University of Pittsburgh and the university’s first full-time Title IX coordinator, died of colon cancer on May 23. She was 49.
Salvador Hector Ochoa, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at San Diego State U., has been named president of Texas A&M U. at San Antonio.
CHIEF EXECUTIVES Appointments Rodney D. Bennett,a former president of the University of Southern Mississippi, has been named the priority candidate for the next chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Amy Bosley,vice president for institutional planning, development, and chief of staff at Valencia College, in Florida, has been named president of Northwest Vista College, in Texas.
Elizabeth R. Cantwell,senior vice president for research and innovation at the University of Arizona, has been named president of Utah State University.
Torie Jackson,interim president of West Virginia University at Parkersburg, has been named to the post permanently.
Todd G. Lamb, a former lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, has been named president of the University of Central Oklahoma.
Ming-Tung (Mike) Lee, has been named president of Sonoma State University, in California, after serving as interim president since August.
Elder Alvin (Trip) F. Meredith III,president of the Utah Salt Lake City South Mission, has been named president of Brigham Young University-Idaho.
Salvador Hector Ochoa, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at San Diego State University, has been named president of Texas A&M University at San Antonio.
Stephen Perez,interim provost and vice president for academic affairs at California State University at Chico, has been named president.
Kimberly Rogers,has been named president of Contra Costa College, after serving as acting president of the California college since June 2022.
J. Luke Wood,vice president for student affairs and campus diversity and chief diversity officer at San Diego State University, has been named president of California State University at Sacramento.
Resignations Venkat Reddy,chancellor of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, will step down and return to the faculty after serving for the next year as an adviser for special projects to the University of Colorado president.
Roderick Smothers,president of Philander Smith College, will step down after eight years leading the Arkansas college.
Ivy Taylor, president of Rust College, in Mississippi, left the position after less than three years.
Jack Thomas, president of Central State University, in Ohio, will step down in June. He will join the faculty after a sabbatical.
Retirements Algie Gatewood,president of Alamance Community College, in North Carolina, plans to retire on July 1.
Elsa M. Núñez,president of Eastern Connecticut State University since 2006, will retire.
David Wippman,president of Hamilton College, in New York, will retire next year.
Carol Ash
CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICERS Appointments Carol Ash,dean of the School of Health, Wellness, and Public Safety at Central New Mexico Community College, has been named vice president for academic affairs and work-force development at Southwest Tennessee Community College.
Lance Nail,dean of the Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, has been named provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Alan Sams,has been named as provost and vice president for academic affairs for the Texas A&M University system after serving as interim provost.
Tricia Serio, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been named provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Washington.
Resignations Jeffrey Duerk,executive vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Miami, in Florida, will step down in July.
OTHER TOP ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Joel Costa,senior vice president for investment management at UnitedHealthcare, has been named chief financial officer and vice president for administration at Bethel University, in Minnesota.
Denise J. Jamieson, a professor and chair of the department of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory University’s School of Medicine and chief of gynecology and obstetrics for Emory Healthcare, has been named vice president for medical affairs and dean of the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.
Lori Seager,associate vice president for finance at Colorado College, has been named vice president for finance and chief financial officer.
Charles A. (Chuck) Wright III,chief development officer for the hunger-relief organization Philabundance, in Philadelphia, has been named vice president for development and vice chancellor for advancement at Rutgers University at Camden.
Resignations Ruth Johnston,vice chancellor and chief operating officer at New Mexico State University, will step down at the end of June.
DEANS Appointments Badia Ahad,vice provost for faculty affairs and a professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, has been named dean of Oxford College of Emory University.
Matthew Ando, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio University.
Jeff Borden,vice provost for learning experience at National University, in California, has been named dean of the School of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, in Washington.
Juan Casas,interim dean of graduate studies at University of Nebraska at Omaha, has been named to the post permanently.
Laura Curran,vice provost for faculty affairs at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, has been named dean of the School of Social Work at the University of Connecticut.
Azim Eskandarian,department head and professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named dean of the College of Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Patrick Fox,head of the department of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, has been named dean of the Russ College of Engineering and Technology at Ohio University.
Kenn Gaither,interim dean of the School of Communications at Elon University, in North Carolina, has been named to the post permanently.
Grant Gosselin,director of undergraduate admission at Boston College, has been named dean of undergraduate admission and financial aid.
Cathy Horn, interim dean of the College of Education at the University of Houston, has been named to the post permanently.
Susan Kelly-Weeder,associate dean for graduate programs in the Connell School of Nursing at Boston College, has been named dean of the School of Nursing at George Washington University.
Andrew R. Klein,interim chancellor of Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis and executive vice president at Indiana University, has been named dean of the Wake Forest University School of Law.
Sheryl Long,dean of graduate and professional studies and director of teacher education and graduate studies in education at Salem College, has been named dean of the School of Education, Health, and Human Sciences at Meredith College. Both colleges are in North Carolina.
Benjamin J. Lough, a professor of social work with an appointment as a professor of business administration in the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named dean of the School of Social Work.
Farzin Madjidi,who has served since August 2022 as interim dean of the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University, in California, has been named to the post permanently.
Celia Marshik,has been named dean of the Graduate School and vice provost for graduate and professional education at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York, after serving in the post in an interim capacity since May 2022.
Pamela McCauley,associate dean of academic programs, diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Wilson College of Textiles at North Carolina State University, has been named dean of the School of Engineering at Widener University, in Pennsylvania.
Ryan F. Morgan,an associate professor and department head for chemistry, geosciences, and physics at Tarleton State University, in Texas, has been named dean of graduate studies and the School of Business, Math, and Science at Chadron State College, in Nebraska.
Deborah Nelson,chair of the department of English language and literature at the University of Chicago, has been named dean of the Division of Humanities.
Keith Russell,chair of the department of health and human development at Western Washington University, has been named dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Nicole S. Sampson,dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York, has been named dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester.
Matt Skillen,dean of faculty and associate provost for student learning at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, has been named assistant provost and dean of faculty at McPherson College, in Kansas.
Patricia Timmons-Goodson,co-chair of the board of the North Carolina Justice Center and a retired associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, has been named dean of the School of Law at North Carolina Central University.
Resignations Jamal J. Rossi,dean of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, will step down after the 2023-24 academic year.
OTHER ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Becky Bangs, director of equal-opportunity investigations and deputy Title IX coordinator in the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access at Oregon State University, has been named executive director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access and Title IX coordinator.
Josh Dunn,chair of the department of political science at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, has been named the first executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Doug Lombardi,an associate professor in the department of human development and quantitative methodology in the College of Education at the University of Maryland at College Park, has been named associate dean for faculty affairs.
Sheena Stewart,director and assistant clinical professor in the department of educational foundations in Auburn University’s College of Education, has been named director of professional development for the university’s Graduate School.
Ryan Zerr,an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Dakota, has been named associate vice president for strategy and implementation.
Resignations Mike Bohn,athletics director at the University of Southern California, has resigned after criticism of his management of the department in addition to complaints over his comments about female colleagues.
DEATHS Sister Candace Introcaso, president of La Roche University, in Pennsylvania, died on May 22. She became president of the university in 2004.
Brian R. Judd,a professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University, died on April 8. He was 92.
Robert E. Lucas Jr.,a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Chicago, died on May 15. He was 85. In 1995, Lucas received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Rosalie M. Mirenda,president emerita of Neumann University, in Pennsylvania, died on May 13. She was 85.
Robert J. Zimmer,chancellor emeritus and former president of the University of Chicago, died on May 23. He was 75. Zimmer led the college from 2006 to 2021, when he transitioned to the role of chancellor.
It’s not unusual for politicians to speak at public colleges’ graduation ceremonies. But this year, one governor’s controversial education policies have drawn protests and petitions from students decrying how an event meant to be celebratory turned hurtful.
Glenn Youngkin, the Republican Virginia governor who made the culture war central to his 2022 election campaign, is slated to speak at George Mason University on Thursday. Earlier this month, he delivered an address at Old Dominion University’s commencement.
At both public institutions, students circulated petitions that collected thousands of signatures. In each case, the petitions took aim at the administrations and asked them to reconsider their decisions to invite Youngkin.
The events showcase a now-familiar dynamic. Colleges boast of the welcoming environments they strive to provide for students, but their autonomy is being threatened by some Republican lawmakers who have targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and even exerted control over curricula. Such lawmakers aren’t guaranteed a warm welcome on campus, and colleges are left to manage sensitive relationships with the state and their students.
Youngkin’s education policies have mostly applied to elementary and secondary schools. When the governor took office in January 2022, he signed an order prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory, the academic concept that racism is the product of not only individual prejudice but also embedded in legal systems and policies. Since then, he has ordered K-12 schools to only allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms, and sign up for sports teams, that correspond with the sex they were assigned at birth. Students said they worry it’s just a matter of time before such policies will be extended to higher education.
“By having Governor Youngkin as this year’s commencement speaker, we believe that the university compromises its supposed values of centering students’ experiences and overall well-being,” reads the GMU petition, which had more than 8,000 signatures on Tuesday evening. “When satiating its own desire to appease the powerful few, the university, once again, has abandoned these principles.”
The Old Dominion petition, with its over 3,000 signatures, was even more pointed: “It is an absolute disgrace that ODU’s president, Brian O. Hemphill, would allow such a disgusting man to speak at this commencement ceremony.”
Creating channels for student feedback can lead to more inclusive decision making.
In an emailed statement, Macaulay Porter, a spokeswoman for Youngkin, said, “Governor Youngkin congratulated ODU students as they embark on their next chapters. Now, the governor looks forward to addressing the 2023 graduates of George Mason University and celebrating their tremendous accomplishment.”
The leaders of both institutions have sought to welcome the governor while also assuring students that they hear them. They noted that their universities have traditions of hosting Virginia governors for commencement. But their approaches differed.
Gregory Washington, the George Mason president, wrote a nearly 900-word letter to the university community that was published five days after the announcement that Youngkin would speak at spring commencement.
“As president of the largest and most diverse public university in our state, I support those students who are making their voices heard, and I applaud their courage and commitment to advocate for themselves and their communities,” Washington wrote. “That being said, I don’t believe that we should silence the voices of those with whom we disagree, especially in this forum where there is no imminent threat present as a result of the disagreements.”
That week about 100 students protested at George Mason, according to local news reports.
Hemphill has not said as much publicly as Washington has about the governor’s visit. In response to questions from The Chronicle, he wrote in an email that “ODU is committed to fostering an environment for the meaningful expression of ideas.”
The president said he met with student leaders ahead of the announcement that Youngkin would be the speaker. “It was important to us that they felt their concerns were heard,” he said. “Creating channels for student feedback can lead to more inclusive decision making and help address concerns effectively.”
One student, who asked to remain anonymous because she worried about retaliation, said she had received an emailed invitation for a 15-minute “year-end discussion” with Hemphill. The meeting took place the following day.
The invitation was a surprise. “President Hemphill is not somebody you can just meet with,” the student said.
At the meeting, the student said Hemphill told her the governor would be the commencement speaker and acknowledged that Youngkin had said things that angered certain communities. While he did not say that protesting would be discouraged, he told the student that “we want to welcome him,” she said.
That meeting was the first in a series of incidents that some Old Dominion students interpreted as intimidation tactics meant to discourage them from protesting during the governor’s appearance. Several students who spoke to The Chronicle on the condition of anonymity had encounters with the campus police. A high-school student who, alongside his brother, an Old Dominion student, held up a banner that said “Blood on your hands,” was temporarily banned from campus.
The four students who spoke to The Chronicle said they did not want to jeopardize anyone’s chance of walking across the stage and earning their diploma. So a small group met with administrators to learn what kind of protest would be permitted by the university. Officials told them that they could protest as long as it was not “disruptive” and did not stop Youngkin from being able to speak.
The students put up posters around campus, wrote chalk messages on the sidewalk, circulated the petition, and painted a campus rock that’s often used to share messages. They spread the word that if other students wanted to protest Youngkin at commencement, they should stand and turn their backs to him when he spoke.
On the morning of the speech, a few students got to campus early. One student was surprised to see that the fliers they’d put up using wheat paste had already been taken down. The rock had been painted over with a pro-Youngkin message earlier in the week.
As families and graduates filed into S.B. Ballard Stadium, the students handed out new fliers and rainbow pride flags. Campus police officers stayed close, the students said. Some students saw someone whose face was covered approach the rock and repaint it with an anti-Youngkin profanity. None of the students who spoke to The Chronicle knew who it was, or that it was going to happen.
But the police seemed to take notice. They questioned the students and pulled one aside, telling him that he was a “person of interest,” a student said. After about 20 minutes, they let him go, but some of the students felt intimidated.
“It was kind of hard to hand out posters when the police are standing there kind of menacingly,” one student said.
Inside the stadium, Youngkin spoke to about 2,000 graduates. Many held up their pride flags. About 100 turned their backs on the governor, Hemphill said in his email.
It was kind of hard to hand out posters when the police are standing there kind of menacingly.
“We were aware that some students intended to protest,” he wrote to The Chronicle. “Trusting students to act responsibly during their protest not only affirms their rights to express themselves, but also empowers them to actively participate in shaping their educational community. With students having the opportunity to engage in meaningful activism, while respecting the importance of the occasion, ODU promoted a culture of civic engagement and active citizenship.”
One student, his younger brother, and a third student, took the “Blood on your hands” banner to the top floor of a garage that overlooks the stadium. When the governor’s speech began, they unfurled the banner.
The police were on the top of the parking garage within three minutes, one of those students said.
“I was pretty anxious, pretty on edge,” he said. “I just kept my eyes forward pretty much, tried to ignore them as much as possible.”
He engaged in a tug of war over the banner with an officer, he said. Eventually, though, he gave in and took it down. The officers took his name and told him to leave. He was trespassing, they said.
Police questioned the student’s brother as he was trying to leave. They told him that because he was “trespassing,” he was banned from campus unless and until he enrolls as a student there. The third student said he was questioned further by police officers when he reached the bottom of the parking lot.
“The situation in question involved two individuals hanging a large sign from the parking garage adjacent to our stadium, which violated the no-sign requirement, blocked a walkway, and was a safety hazard,” Hemphill said in his email to The Chronicle. “In response, they were asked to remove the sign and leave the facility — an action which would have taken regardless of the content of the sign. The non-ODU-affiliated young man was not permanently banned from campus. We are not aware of any other concerns about police interactions.”
Students had designated space to protest next to the stadium, Hemphill said. Noting the importance of free expression, he said the protesters were respected and the police were not directed to engage with them.
These students said the administration’s case for the freedom of speech seemed to apply only to the governor and his right to take the stage uninterrupted, not to their right to object to him.
One ODU student, who is trans, said that having Youngkin speak at graduation transformed the event from a happy one to one that served as a reminder that “there are people out there who want us dead or want us to not have access to the care that we need.”
He watched the speech from the audience because his girlfriend was graduating.
“It’s supposed to be a time of pride for her,” he said.
A university president will step down from his second leadership post in three years, after a tenure in which he worked to reverse enrollment declines but also faced an investigation over concerns about his management style.
Jack Thomas, the president of Central State University, a historically Black institution in Wilberforce, Ohio, also contended with strong opposition at his previous institution, Western Illinois University; supporters there said a campaign to oust Thomas, who is Black, was racially motivated.
Thomas said on Monday he’d resign as president of Central State and join the faculty as a tenured professor after a sabbatical, rather than seek renewal of his contract, which is set to expire next month. He made that decision “having accomplished what I set out to do as president,” including jump-starting a new strategic plan and a $75-million campus expansion, he wrote in a letter to the university community.
Thomas said he was busy with meetings on Tuesday and referred The Chronicle to his letter in response to emailed questions. He declined to comment on the claims about his management style, citing employee lawsuits against the university.
“The board thanks Dr. Thomas for his service to the university and the progress that the university has made during his time as president,” Mark Hatcher, the chair of Central State’s board, said in a statement. “The board will immediately begin plans for a search for Dr. Thomas’s successor.”
Thomas’s three-year tenure at Central State has been marred by claims of discrimination, wrongful termination, and a toxic work environment. Those accusations were levied against him by five current and former female employees, all of whom are Black and held leadership positions. They wrote to Central State’s board last August alleging mistreatment.
An independent investigation by a Cincinnati-based law firm found Thomas’s behavior problematic — describing his behavior toward some female employees as “rude, belittling, and bullying” — but noted it “does not rise to the level of harassment,” the Dayton Daily Newsreported. (Two of the women subsequently filed a lawsuit against Central State; their lawyer, David Duwel, did not return a phone call on Tuesday requesting comment.)
Thomas also had to deal with scrutiny of a free-tuition program at Central State. In 2020, the university began offering a free-college program for union employees through an online-program manager, or OPM. Eastern Gateway Community College, also in Ohio, offered a similar deal. Students who earned associate degrees at Eastern Gateway could then transfer to Central State and finish their bachelor’s degrees.
The arrangement brought thousands of new students to Central State, which had struggled with enrollment for years. In the fall of 2019, the university enrolled about 2,000 students. Three years later, enrollment had grown to more than 5,400 students, with 3,600 of them fully online. Eastern Gateway, meanwhile, enrolled tens of thousands of online learners.
But then the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits both institutions, raised concerns about the educational quality of Eastern Gateway’s program. And last year, the U.S. Education Department ordered Eastern Gateway to shut it down, saying the financial arrangement was illegal. Central State followed suit in January after discussions with federal officials.
Enrollment challenges were a central feature of Thomas’s eight years at Western Illinois, too. The university saw a 35-percent drop in enrollment, the elimination of academic majors and the demolition of dorms, and more than 100 people losing their jobs in a decade. People who supported Thomas at the time said the problems weren’t entirely his fault: Population declines in the Midwest were already putting pressure on the institution, and a lengthy state-budget impasse made matters worse. But some critics pointed at the president’s office.
Disagreements over how much Thomas was to blame for the crisis caused a schism in Macomb, Ill., the town of 15,000 that’s home to Western. The conflict pitted the mostly white business community against prominent Black residents who saw opposition to the president as bad racial optics, according to a 2019 Chronicle investigation.
Among other criticisms of Thomas at Western Illinois were that he prioritized “diversity over excellence” in hiring and that he’d been less than fully transparent in discussions with trustees that violated public-meetings law.
Some observers also protested the fact that, in a decade, the student body had gone from about 13 percent people of color to 34 percent, with one trustee expressing concern about the “ethnicity” of the university. “I know certainly that some of the opposition to Jack is racist,” one emeritus professor wrote to a trustee in an email leaked to local media, “but even if he were purple he has been a near total failure here.” (Both the professor and the trustee were white.)
When Thomas departed Western Illinois, he negotiated a generous exit package that granted him two years of administrative leave at his base salary of $270,000, alongside annual annuity contributions of $27,000, life insurance, and health insurance. Under that agreement, Thomas and Western Illinois agreed not to disparage one another; the university was to respond to prospective employers who reached out about Thomas “by emphasizing his accomplishments.”
Thomas’s three-year contract at Central State calls for him to be paid $300,000 in the final year, plus benefits, the Dayton Daily Newsreported.
The college presidency — which has seen a wave of turnovers in recent years — has long been recognized as a challenging job that can sometimes put those in the position on the path to burnout. That’s among the reasons that the average time presidents have held their current position has dropped to 5.9 years, according to a new survey of college presidents.
That survey also offers some insights into what can make the job so tough: If presidents are spending less time in their jobs, they also need to quickly learn more about some aspects of higher education.
More on the ACE Survey
The latest American College President survey, released on Friday by the American Council on Education, asked college leaders about areas in which they would like more training. Of the 32 options that respondents could select, at least one out of five presidents said they wanted to learn more about roughly one-third of them. Among that group were topics like diversity and equity issues, fund raising, and capital improvement projects.
The survey, which embraced responses from more than 1,000 presidents, also revealed that the most popular professional-development prospects for men and women were largely the same. In the mix for women, however, was crisis management; for men, it was enrollment management.
Among the areas that nearly all college presidents reported feeling most confident about: student life or conduct issues, and the role of their spouses. Only 4.3 percent and 5.2 percent of leaders, respectively, said they wanted more training on those topics.
For more highlights about how presidents answered this question — “In which of the following areas would you like more training and/or development for your current presidency/CEO post?” — see below:
Thousands of instructors at Rutgers University joined a national surge in union activity on Monday, becoming the fifth currently active strike on a college campus.
Three unions representing roughly 9,000 educators, researchers, and clinicians announced the strike on Sunday after nearly a year of contract negotiations. The strike will disrupt classes for Rutgers’ nearly 70,000 students across three campuses.
Union leadership is asking its members to join the picket line and refuse to conduct teaching, research, and other business at Rutgers, according to the largest of the three unions on strike. Strikers are still permitted to complete certain responsibilities, like writing letters of recommendation for students.
“By exercising our right to withhold our labor, we will prove to the administration that WE are the university,” the union, Rutgers American Association of University Professionals-American Federation of Teachers, wrote in a letter to its members.
The standoff has put a harsh spotlight on Jonathan Holloway, the Rutgers president. Holloway drew pushback for initially suggesting that his administration would seek a court order to stop the strike and force a “return to normal activities.”
The Rutgers administration walked back that threat on Monday after a meeting with New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, according to Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin.
Murphy “asked us to delay taking legal action asking the courts to order strikers back to work so that no further irreparable harm is caused to our students and to their continued academic progress,” Devlin wrote in an email. “We agreed to his request to refrain from seeking an injunction while it appears that progress can be made.”
A labor expert said turning to the courts amid a strike might make the situation worse. “One thing that injunctions can cause is it can actually exacerbate the conflict as opposed to hoping to resolve the conflict,” said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in the City University of New York.
Holloway is a scholar of African American studies and history. An open letter from over 40 prominent historians of labor and African American history — including Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at Boston University and the founder of the Center for Antiracist Research — had called on Holloway to rescind his threat of an injunction. The letter also voiced support for the striking workers.
“We know that as an expert in African American history, you have thought deeply about how struggles for racial justice have consistently been aligned with the demands for jobs, labor rights, and democracy in the workplace,” the letter stated.
Holloway expressed his frustration with the strike in a letter to the campus community on Sunday. “To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement, especially given that just two days ago, both sides agreed in good faith to the appointment of a mediator to help us reach agreements,” Holloway wrote.
Rutgers is facing financial woes, and Holloway said in February that the university would have to remedy a $125-million shortfall over the next three years.
In a message to students and faculty about the strike, Rutgers wrote that it was “committed to ensuring that our more than 67,000 students are unaffected by the strike and may continue their academic progress.” Rutgers plans to continue classes and distribute grades and expects employees to report to work. The issue is a pressing one as the end of the semester looms, with finals and grades coming soon.
Rutgers officials wrote that employees who engage in the strike “are subject to a loss of pay and/or benefits, and other sanctions as they may apply or as the court deems appropriate.”
There is no state law that prohibits public-sector workers from striking in New Jersey, Herbert said, adding that Holloway’s argument relied on common law, or legal precedent from the courts, which have intervened in strikes from public workers in the past.
“Although there is no state statute that bars strikes, in some instances, courts in New Jersey have issued injunctions against walkouts by public employees,” the Rutgers AAUP-AFT wrote on its website. “An injunction may require public employees to end a strike and return to work. The University administration would have to petition a court for an injunction.”
The strike comes after 94 percent of members of two of the unions — representing primarily full- and part-time faculty and graduate workers — voted to authorize a strike in March.
We’ve been bargaining for 10, 11 months — got virtually no response to any of our proposals, and when we did, they were paltry. They were insulting.
The unions’ bargaining demands include increased pay to keep up with inflation for graduate workers, better job security for part-time lecturers, and more affordable housing for university community members.
Rutgers officials have offered salary increases for faculty, postdocs, and graduate employees, but union leaders say the raises aren’t good enough.
The university’s proposal would provide across-the-board 12-percent pay increases for full-time faculty by July 1, 2025; 3 percent in lump-sum payments to all the faculty unions to be paid out over the first two years of the new contract; a 20-percent increase in the per-credit salary rate for part-time lecturers over the four years of the contract; a 20-percent increase in the minimum salary for postdocs in four years; and higher wages for graduate assistants and teaching assistants.
“The offers that they’re presenting still aren’t enough to guarantee a living wage for the people who are most essential, one could argue, to the successful operation of the university,” said Manu Chander, an associate professor of English at Rutgers’ Newark campus and the president of the Newark chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.
Chander said he’s on strike to improve conditions for adjunct faculty and graduate employees, whom he described as the most vulnerable workers.
Kyle Riismandel, an associate professor of history and American studies at Rutgers and the vice president of the Newark chapter of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, said the picket line drew a large crowd on Monday.
“We’ve been bargaining for 10, 11 months — got virtually no response to any of our proposals, and when we did, they were paltry,” Riismandel said. “They were insulting.”
New Mexico State University’s chancellor, Dan E. Arvizu, resigned, effective immediately, on Friday during a special meeting of the Board of Regents. The board had agreed in December not to renew Arvizu’s five-year contract, which was to end June 30.
Instead of waiting for the contract to expire, the board accepted Arvizu’s resignation to smooth and accelerate the transition to a new leader. Arvizu has overseen a period of turmoil at the Hispanic- and minority-serving institution that saw the provost fired, the president leave, and the men’s basketball coach fired and its season canceled. Meanwhile, tensions between the directors of Black Programs and the university’s equity, inclusion, and diversity office resulted in a churn of leaders in that office, and demands from Black student leaders that they be assigned to a different office.
“This separation is truly mutual,” Arvizu said during the meeting. “For the past five years, my only motivation has been to do what I believe is in the best interest of NMSU, and transitioning now will allow the university to devote the time and effort needed over the next several months for a successful search.”
“I am not a traditional university administrator. I didn’t grow up in the academy,” he added. “My expertise is in energy research and in materials and process science, development, and deployment. In 2018, I was honored to be selected as chancellor of this great university system. Since then, it has been my privilege to lead this institution through some tough times, navigate a pandemic, and engineer the turnaround. Now, the time has come to accelerate the transition to a new chancellor.”
The board also announced the selection of Jay Gogue, who served as president of NMSU from 2000 to 2003, as interim chancellor, starting immediately. He also served as president and chancellor of the University of Houston system, as well as Auburn University. Gogue will serve while the board searches for the next permanent chancellor.
“The Board of Regents appreciates all Chancellor Arvizu has done for our university,” Ammu Devasthali, chair of the regents, said. “As we thank him and wish him well, we, at the same time, welcome Jay and Susie Gogue back to Las Cruces.”
In an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos criticized administrative bloat at Stanford University, writing that the institution “employs more administrators than it enrolls undergrads.” DeVos’s commentary, which takes aim at Stanford’s handling of false sexual-assault accusations made by a student, repeats a sentiment that’s circulated in many publications in recent months. The Free Press, for instance, noted that Stanford has nearly enough administrators “for each student to have their own personal butler.”
That eye-popping claim capitalizes on a frequent criticism of higher ed: that it relies on an ever-increasing tally of administrative staff whose duties are of dubious value, whose often heavy-handed decisions tend to lead to controversy, and whose presence on the nation’s campuses is driving up the cost of college.
DeVos’s numbers are correct: Stanford enrolled 7,645 undergraduates in the fall of 2021 and employed 8,800 full-time staff members outside of its medical school who didn’t have teaching as a primary duty according to data it reported to the Department of Education. But the numbers also ignore several layers of nuance, one expert says. (While Stanford offered the data, university officials did not respond to a request for comment; the Department of Education referred The Chronicle to a 2022 statement about proposed changes in Title IX guidance.)
Undergraduate education is only a part of what they do.
For one thing, Stanford, like many highly selective research institutions, isn’t focused on only the undergraduate experience. “A lot of people don’t understand how a large research university functions, and especially these super-elite ones that have small undergraduate populations,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “But even in your big public flagships, undergraduate education is only a part of what they do. There’s a lot of graduate education and a lot of research, and that’s where a lot of the staff and administrators are.”
That’s true of Stanford, which in the fall of 2022 had 10,035 graduate students and devoted $1.82 billion to externally funded research projects, including its Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which employed 1,700 people in 2021-22.
Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, doesn’t account for those differences, making it difficult to discern which administrators are working directly with undergraduates or with graduate students or on external research projects. In the fall of 2021 — the most recent data available through Ipeds — Stanford’s payroll included 9,201 full-time staff members outside of the medical school, 8,800 of whom didn’t have teaching as a primary duty. That number has increased by 35 percent in the past decade.
Included in that total were 294 research staff members and 1,011 people in “management occupations,” which can include chief executives and managers in fund raising, facilities, computer systems, and more, according to the government classification system Ipeds uses. Stanford also employed 1,173 people in “computer, engineering, and science occupations,” a category that includes such positions as customer-support specialists, web developers, architectural drafters, and life-, physical-, and social-science technicians. The university had 703 employees in “office and administrative support occupations,” and — the largest category of staff members — 2,725 people working in business and financial operations. That category can include business managers, project managers, and accountants, Kelchen said. “A lot of what used to be considered just purely staff secretarial support, they’ve moved into this ‘business and financial operations,’” he said. “For example, anything with HR is there; compliance; anyone who touches finance, essentially.”
DeVos’s column highlights how administrative staffing numbers can easily be turned into grist for a wide variety of criticism. The former secretary, who during her tenure sought to strengthen rules protecting the rights of students accused of sexual assault, wrote about a case at Stanford in which an employee in its housing department was charged with filing false reports of rape. The university spent more than $300,000 on an investigation and improving security measures in the wake of initial claims, which were also part of the impetus for a campus protest. The situation, DeVos wrote, was “complicated by the incessant buildup of nonteaching bureaucrats.”
Other voices in higher ed have complained about the influence of administrators, but for different reasons. Some professors, for instance, protested Hamline University administrators’ intervention after an art-history lecturer showed a painting of the Prophet Muhammad in an online class (the lecturer’s contract was not renewed; Hamline’s president announced her retirement on Monday). One faculty member wrote in The Chronicle about her “cartoonish cancellation” by University of Michigan administrators when she became the subject of an equity-office investigation there. Meanwhile, some say the proliferation of administrative staff is necessary — because students clamor for more mental-health services, for example.
In addition to student demand, risk-management and legal concerns can drive some of the growth in administrative positions. Kelchen pointed out that Stanford’s Title IX website lists 20 employees, two of whom are students. “We could have a discussion about whether they should have five or 50″ employees in that office, he said. “But even if they have 50, it’s a small percentage of their staff.”
John Karl Scholz, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the U. of Wisconsin at Madison, has been named president of the U. of Oregon.
CHIEF EXECUTIVES Appointments William J. Bisset,vice president for enrollment management and student affairs at Marymount University, has been named president of Lourdes University.
Ann E. Cudd,provost and senior vice chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh, has been named president of Portland State University.
J. Kyle Dalpe, interim president of Western Nevada College, has been named to the post permanently.
Christopher Dougherty,an associate professor of business and former vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Chestnut Hill College, in Pennsylvania, has been named president of Madonna University, in Michigan.
Christopher Heigle,vice president for student affairs at Arkansas Northeastern College, has been named president.
Patrick Jacobson-Schulte, interim president of Briar Cliff University since July 2022, has been named to the post permanently.
William Kennedy,vice president for admissions and athletics at Midway University, in Kentucky, has been named president of Andrew College, in Georgia.
Cheryl A. McConnell, interim president of Saint Joseph’s University, in Pennsylvania, has been named to the post permanently. She will become the first woman to serve as permanent president of the university.
James Moorehas been named president of West Virginia Wesleyan College after serving as interim president since February 2022.
Andreia Nebel,vice president for academic affairs at Clarkson College, in Nebraska, has been named president of the college.
Aparna Dileep-Nageswaran Palmer,vice president for the Boulder County Campus and interim vice president for the Larimer County Campus of Front Range Community College, in Colorado, has been named chancellor of the University of Alaska Southeast.
Stuart Rayfield, vice chancellor for leadership and institutional development at the University System of Georgia, has been named president of Columbus State University.
Laura A. Rosenbury,dean of the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida, has been named president of Barnard College.
John Karl Scholz,provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been named president of the University of Oregon.
Aondover Tarhule,vice president for academic affairs and provost at Illinois State University, has been named interim president.
John Wesley Taylor V,an associate director of education at the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, has been chosen as the next president of Andrews University.
Safa Zaki, dean of the faculty and a professor of psychology at Williams College, has been named president of Bowdoin College. She will be the first woman to lead the institution.
Resignations Gregory T. Busch, president of Mesalands Community College, in New Mexico, has resigned.
Raymond E. Crossman,president of Adler University since 2003, plans to step down at the end of the next academic year.
Thomas Hudson,president of Jackson State University, in Mississippi, has resigned after being placed on administrative leave.
William Shiell,president of Northern Seminary since 2016, has resigned. John Bowling, former president of Olivet Nazarene University, has been named acting president.
CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICERS Appointments Amir Dabirian,vice president for information technology and chief information officer at California State University at Fullerton, has been named provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university.
Ibrahim Boran
Joseph R. Franco
Joseph R. Franco, interim provost at Pace University, has been named provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.
KerryAnn O’Meara,a professor of higher education and special assistant to the provost for strategic initiatives at the University of Maryland at College Park, has been named vice president for academic affairs, provost, and dean of Teachers College, Columbia University.
Resignations Pardis Mahdavi,provost and executive vice president of the University of Montana at Missoula, will step down at the end of the semester.
OTHER TOP ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Larry Brandolph,interim vice president for information technology at Temple University, has been named to the post permanently.
Endia DeCordova,vice chancellor for advancement at Rutgers University at Camden, has been named vice president for institutional advancement at Morgan State University and executive director of the Morgan State University Foundation Inc.
Wilson Garone,vice president and chief financial officer at Seattle University, has been named vice president for finance and administration at Santa Clara University, in California.
Kevin Hoeft, a former director of education-policy development in the Florida Department of Education, has been named vice president for enrollment management at New College of Florida.
Jake Lemon,president and chief executive of the UConn Foundation at the University of Connecticut, has been named vice president for philanthropy and alumni engagement at the University of Kentucky.
Courtney McKenna, associate vice president for organizational development at Wentworth Institute of Technology, has been named vice president for student affairs.
D’Andra Mull,vice president for student life at the University of Florida, has been named vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Thiadora Pina, a clinical professor and director of the externship program in the Santa Clara University School of Law, has been named the school’s first senior director for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Ellen Reynolds, interim vice president for student affairs at the University of Rhode Island, has been named to the post permanently.
Benjamin E. Rohdin,interim vice president for enrollment management and student success and associate vice president for enrollment management and student success at New Jersey City University, has been named vice president for enrollment management at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York.
La’Leatha Spillers
La’Leatha Spillers,chief advancement officer for the YWCA West Central Michigan, has been named vice president for marketing and communications at Calvin University.
Kumble Subbaswamy,departing chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been named interim senior vice president for academic and student affairs and equity for the University of Massachusetts system.
Kathryn Svinarich,associate provost and dean of the College of Science and Liberal Arts at Kettering University, has been named chief of staff.
Eric Young,director of undergraduate admissions at Walsh University, has been named vice president for enrollment at Malone University, in Ohio.
Retirements Ellen Taylor, vice chancellor for student affairs at Washington State University at Pullman, plans to retire in December.
DEANS Appointments Kristina K. Bethea Odejimi,dean of students at Bowdoin College, has been named dean of students and associate vice president for belonging, engagement, and community at Emory University.
James Buss,dean of the Honors College at Northern Kentucky University, has been named dean of the Honors College at Ball State University.
Darryl Butt,dean of the College of Mines and Earth Sciences and director of the Multi-Scale Fluid-Solid Interactions in Architected and Natural Materials Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of Utah, has been named dean of the university’s Graduate School.
Kelly Chandler-Olcott, interim dean of the School of Education at Syracuse University, has been named to the post permanently.
David De Cremer, a professor of management and organization in the Business School at the National University of Singapore, has been named dean of the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University.
Elaine Gagliardi, interim dean of the Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana since June 2022, has been named to the post permanently.
John W. Miller Jr.,dean of curriculum and senior diversity officer at St. Norbert College, has been named dean of the Raymond A. Kent School of Social Work and Family Science at the University of Louisville.
Behzad Mortazavi,chair and professor of biological sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama, has been named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University.
Brittany Schaffer,head of artist and label partnerships in Nashville for Spotify, has been named the first female dean of the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business at Belmont University, in Tennessee.
Edward Thomas Jr., interim dean of the College of Sciences and Mathematics at Auburn University, has been named to the post permanently.
Fabrice Veron, interim dean of University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, has been named dean of the college.
Dlynn Armstrong Williams,head of the department of political science and international affairs at the University of North Georgia, has been named dean of the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences at Austin Peay State University.
Resignations Ed Kelley,dean of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma since 2016, plans to resign.
Retirements Linda Petrosino,dean of the School of Health Sciences and Human Performance at Ithaca College, plans to retire.
OTHER ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Gloria DiFulvio,undergraduate program director for the public-health-sciences major in the School of Public Health and Health Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has been named associate dean for undergraduate academic affairs.
Johnson Eapen, associate vice president for human resources at Franklin and Marshall College, has been named associate vice president for human resources at Alvernia University.
Rodmon King,dean of institutional equity and inclusion at Connecticut College, has been named assistant dean for diversity, inclusion, and belonging in the School of Public Health and Health Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Taylor Ogden,director of development at the Orchard School in Indianapolis, has been named director of development at Franklin College.
Jordan Pascucci,associate dean of evaluation and selection at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named vice dean and director of admissions.
Dina Refki,director of the Center for Women in Government and Civil Society at the University at Albany, has been named executive director of the Institute on Immigrant Integration Research and Policy at the State University of New York.
Kristina Wong Davis,former vice provost for enrollment management at Purdue University, has been named vice provost for enrollment management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Corey Zink, executive director of academic advising and assessment in the Division of Student Affairs at Idaho State University, has been named associate vice president for enrollment management.
Resignations Roderick Perry,director of athletics at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, will step down.
ORGANIZATIONS Appointments Frank Dooley, chancellor of Purdue Global, has been elected to the board of directors of the American Council on Education.
Kara D. Freeman,senior vice president and chief operating officer of the American Council on Education, has been named president and chief executive of the National Association of College and University Business Officers.
Gabriella Gómez,deputy director of policy and finance for U.S. program policy and communications at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has been named executive vice president for policy, advocacy, and communications at Strada Education Network.
DEATHS Francisco Ayala,a former professor of biological sciences and philosophy at the University of California at Irvine, died on March 3. He was 88. Ayala resigned from the university in 2018 after multiple sexual-harassment allegations against him.
Larry G. Coleman, a former director of multicultural affairs at the Community College of Baltimore County, died on January 22. He was 76.
William R. Cotter, the longest-serving president of Colby College, died on March 9. He was 87. Cotter was president of the college from 1979 to 2000.
Bernard Dobroski,professor emeritus and former dean of the Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, died on February 19. He was 76.
Audrey Eubanks,a former vice president for academic affairs at the University of Mobile, died on February 26.
Donald Snyder,a former president of Lehigh Carbon Community College, died on March 4. He was 71. Snyder led the college from 2000 to 2013.
A student protest that interrupted a controversial speaker at Stanford University last week led its president and law dean to criticize campus staff, including, apparently, the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion who joined the speaker at the podium and discussed the students’ concerns.
Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, was invited to give a talk titled “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation With the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter,” by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization.
Duncan was met with a room of loud student protesters who said his history of court rulings had caused harm to LGBTQ+ students, and that giving him a platform on campus diminished their safety. (His confirmation to the Fifth Circuit was opposed by groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which cited Duncan’s decisions against rights for same-sex couples and against gender-affirming bathroom access for transgender children.)
But a free-speech advocate contacted by The Chronicle said the protesters took it too far and prevented Duncan from completing the speech he was invited to give, which she said infringed on his speech rights. The situation at Stanford comes amid a national debate over how to balance free expression and student safety. It is common for conservative student groups to invite provocative speakers to give lectures on campus, which then face backlash from protesters.
“These students [protesters] are free to engage in counter-speech via peaceful protest, asserting that Judge Duncan’s judicial decisions ‘cause harm,’” wrote Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in an email to The Chronicle. “What happened Thursday was not counter-speech. It was censorship.”
Stanford leaders appeared to agree. President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Jenny S. Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law School, apologized to Duncan in a joint letter.
“What happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus,” the letter read. “We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings.”
The letter stated that under Stanford’s disruption policy, students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a public event by “heckling or other forms of interruption.”
The letter also criticized Stanford staff for their response to the protesters.
“Staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech,” the letter from Stanford leadership read.
Neither Tessier-Lavigne nor Martinez were made available for comment, but their letter appeared to reference the actions of Tirien Angela Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. As captured in a video of the event, she joined Duncan at the podium after he apparently requested that an administrator assist in quieting the student protesters. At first, Duncan appeared confused when Steinbach identified herself as an administrator.
Then, Steinbach proceeded to address the crowd for roughly six minutes, as she shared her support for the student protesters but encouraged them to allow Duncan to speak.
“I’m uncomfortable because this event is tearing at the fabric of this community that I care about and that I’m here to support,” Steinbach said to the crowd. She continued to explain that for many people in the crowd, Duncan’s work had “caused harm.”
“My job is to create a space of belonging for all people in this institution, and that is hard and messy and not easy and the answers are not black or white or right or wrong,” Steinbach said. “This is actually part of the creation of belonging.”
Still, she questioned the decision to invite Duncan to speak.
Steinbach asked Duncan, “Is it worth the pain that this causes and the division that this causes? Do you have something so incredibly important to say about Twitter and guns and Covid that that is worth this impact on the division of these people, who have sat next to each other for years, who are going through what is the battle of law school together?”
Steinbach said that she believes the right to free speech must be upheld, because if Duncan’s speech were censored it wouldn’t be long before the protesters’ speech was censored as well.
But she said she understood that some students might want to change Stanford’s policies to prioritize safety and inclusion.
“I understand why people feel like harm is so great that we might need to reconsider these policies,” Steinbach said. “Luckily they are in a school where they can learn the advocacy skills to advocate for those changes.”
The Chronicle emailed Steinbach for reaction to the letter from Stanford’s president and law school dean, but received no answer.
Among an avalanche of bills filed in the Texas Legislature on Friday were at least half a dozen proposals that would affect public colleges — a sign of Republican politicians’ keen interest in reforming higher ed this year.
Prior to Friday, state legislators had already filed bills that proposed prohibiting colleges from requiring diversity statements as a condition of employment or admission; preventing employers, including city and county governments and higher-ed institutions, from using “inherent classifications” — race, gender, etc. — in employment or admissions decisions; and banning colleges from staffing diversity, equity, and inclusion offices.
The push in Texas comes amid heightened legislative interest nationwide in reforming higher ed this year. At least 21 bills in 13 states have been introduced so far that would curb colleges’ attempts to boost diversity, equity, and inclusion if passed, a Chronicle analysis found. Texas lawmakers appear interested both in restricting colleges’ diversity efforts and in reshaping other aspects of higher ed.
Here are some of the higher-ed bills that emerged in Texas on Friday.
HB 1607 would prohibit instruction on certain concepts relating to race and gender, such as discrimination and unconscious or conscious bias, by withholding state funding. Versions of the legislation have passed in a number of other states over the last two years.
SB 2313/HB 5001 would prohibit public colleges from requiring diversity training as a condition for enrollment or registration. A handful of other states are considering similar measures this year.
SB 18would eliminate tenure or any type of permanent-employment status at public institutions of higher ed. The proposal comes amid efforts in other states — including North Dakota and Florida — to significantly modify tenure.
HB 4736would prohibit the admission of Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, Russian, and undocumented students at public colleges. Current state law permits undocumented students who meet certain eligibility requirements to receive financial aid and pay in-state tuition.
SB 2335would permit institutions of higher education which are “adversely impacted by retaliatory action” taken by accrediting agencies, which control colleges’ access to federal financial aid, to sue for damages. The measure comes as accreditors and Republican-led college-governing boards clash in Idaho and North Carolina. For example, a board member at North Idaho College, which was issued a “show cause” sanction last month amid leadership dysfunction, recently accused the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities of leading a “political” process to strip the college’s accreditation.
SB 19 would create the Texas University Fund — an endowment to support four of the state’s public research institutions: Texas Tech University, the University of Houston, Texas State University, and the University of North Texas.
In recent months, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has laid out a comprehensive vision that would place public higher education under extraordinary state control. A bill introduced this week would write that vision into law.
House Bill 999 takes up almost every bullet-pointed goal that DeSantis included for public higher education in a press release last month. It would prohibit public colleges from funding any projects that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory rhetoric,” no matter the funding source; allow boards of trustees to conduct a post-tenure review of faculty members at any time for cause; and put faculty hiring into the hands of trustees. It also has new specifics DeSantis hadn’t proposed, such as a ban on gender studies as a major or minor.
“This bill will be a gut punch to anyone who cares about public education in a democracy or academic freedom or the fact that our system of higher education is the envy of the world,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “Because higher ed in America is organized around the fact that research and teaching and decisions involving research and teaching are best made by experts and scholars in the field.”
“We need to protest, we need to vote, we need to make our voices heard,” Mulvey added, acknowledging a student protest on Thursday. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The future of higher education is at stake. If it works in Florida, you know it’ll spread to other red states.”
In a news conference in January, DeSantis said his proposals would help Florida “continue to lead in the area of higher education,” and the governor has expressed a desire to rein in public spending on campus initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Neither DeSantis nor Robert Alexander “Alex” Andrade, HB 999’s sponsor, returned requests for comment.
The bill is very early in the legislative process. Andrade, a Republican representative in the Florida House who has filed other bills closely aligned with DeSantis’s agenda, filed HB 999 on Tuesday, and the legislative session doesn’t start until March 7. HB 999 may yet change before it passes, if it passes at all, but at least one politics expert in Florida saw it as a sign of what’s to come.
“My hope is that we get at least some of the more alarming things that are in these bills toned down a little bit, but, at the same time, I think there’s definitely a lot of momentum among Florida Republicans to do something here,” said Nicholas R. Seabrook, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida who has been critical of DeSantis’s posture on higher ed. “We’re definitely going to see something come out of this legislative session.”
Although he expects legal challenges to HB 999 if it passes, Seabrook also thought it could better pass legal muster than last year’s “Stop WOKE” Act, which has its higher-ed portions under injunction. HB 999 takes aim at funding for programs, curriculum, and hiring, issues in which the state “legitimately has a greater role,” Seabrook said.
Among the specifics of the bill: It directs trustees to remove from their universities majors and minors “in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.” It’s not clear whether any public Florida university has a critical race theory or intersectionality major or minor, but a majority of the 12 institutions offer gender studies as either a major or a minor or both.
(Critical race theory refers to a set of ideas that arose from legal scholars decades ago that, among other things, positions racism as a structural force. Intersectionality is a theory that refers to “the idea that forms of prejudice overlap.” Both resist simple definition.)
HB 999 would make boards of trustees responsible for hiring faculty members, and while it would allow boards to delegate that task to the college president, it prohibits the president from further delegating hiring to, say, faculty members. It clarifies that while “diversity” programs are banned, that doesn’t include support for “military veterans, Pell Grant recipients, first generation college students, nontraditional students, ‘2+2’ transfer students from the Florida College System, students from low-income families, or students with unique abilities.”
The bill would create new rules around general-education courses. For example, they may not teach “American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” It continues: “Whenever applicable,” gen-ed courses are to “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”
But teaching history well does include some realities that are contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, according to James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, who has written books about 20th-century African American history. Inviting students to wrestle with colonialism and slavery in early American history is both truthful and helps with “students learning how to think historically and students learning how no ideas exist outside of context. Their ideas, their parents’ ideas, their teachers’ ideas, no ideas exist outside of a context,” Grossman said.
There are some parts of HB 999 that Seabrook, the University of North Florida professor, agrees with. The bill adds language to Florida law about how a part of public universities’ mission is to prepare students “for citizenship of the constitutional republic.” He also thinks colleges could do more to foster intellectual diversity on campus, but HB 999 is not the way to go about it.
“It’s identifying that there’s perhaps a problem with academia leaning one way on the ideological spectrum, and then you see what they’re doing at New College,” he said. “They’re just replacing it with an even worse model that goes in the opposite direction.”
Marymount University, in Virginia, plans to make a sharp turn away from the humanities, eliminating nine liberal-arts majors for undergraduate students. The move highlights tough decisions that many colleges are making in a challenging financial environment, as well as a broader debate about the kind of education colleges should offer.
The plan, backed by Marymount President Irma Becerra, would sunset majors in English, math, economics, philosophy, and the arts, among others. The cuts would affect one-sixth of all undergraduate majors offered at Marymount. Becerra submitted her plan on Wednesday to the university’s Board of Trustees, which will make a final decision on February 24, according to emails shared with The Chronicle.
Many faculty members say the president’s decision raises concerns about whether the university is still committed to the liberal arts at all. They also question whether senior administrators are respecting shared governance and listening to the perspectives of faculty, students, and alumni, many of whom expressed doubts about the plan.
The university’s Academic Policy, Budget, and Planning Committee — whose membership includes two faculty members from each of its three colleges, the dean of each college, and other administrators — first proposed eliminating the nine majors.
Becerra rejected recommendations from the Faculty Council to keep seven of the majors and modify six of them. The ideas outlined by the committee “more closely align with the strategic goals of the institution,” Becerra wrote in a letter to the Faculty Council’s president.
“True to our mission, all university programs will continue to be grounded in the liberal arts and focused on the education of the whole person,” Becerra wrote, “but MU cannot financially sustain offering majors with consistently low enrollment, low graduation rates, and lack of potential for growth.”
Marymount’s Student Government Association and the American Historical Association sent letters to Becerra, urging her to reverse course and preserve the majors. Some alumni started an online petition.
“Cutting portions of the School of Humanities as well as math and art programs would be detrimental to the diversity of our student body,” wrote Ashly Trejo Mejia, Marymount’s student-government president, in her letter. “We fear that removing programs will alter the foundation and identity Marymount University was built on.”
Even though the cuts aren’t official until the board signs off, students in the affected majors received an email on Thursday from Stephanie Ellis Foster, the university’s vice provost, informing them that their programs were being phased out.
“What this means is that we will not accept new students in these programs but we are committed to continue to offer classes until all current students graduate,” Foster wrote in the email to affected students and shared with The Chronicle. “We have made arrangements to provide the required courses for your major [eliminated majors] without disruption.”
Mejia wrote in her letter to Becerra that alumni and current students are concerned that the president’s decision will weaken the perception of their degrees.
“Current and future alumni want to be proud of their alma mater and they fear that with this action their success will be hindered by a weakened perception of their MU education from a program that no longer exists,” Mejia wrote.
Ariane Economos, an associate professor of philosophy who serves as director of the School of Humanities and the liberal-arts core curriculum, said that Marymount faculty largely support keeping the programs. The Faculty Council voted 88-49, with seven abstentions, to modify the curriculum changes in order to keep seven of the majors, according to meeting minutes.
“I wish our administration would respect the role of faculty governance in determining the curriculum,” Economos said.
Economos said the recommendations from the committee are based on the number of students enrolled in each major, which she said doesn’t provide a complete picture of the value of those programs.
Economos created a “data-informed” report that described some of the other factors that she thought Marymount leaders should consider — including programs that are available at the university’s peer institutions; programs at R2 universities, which Marymount aspires to be; credit hours generated by programs; effects on student recruitment and retention; the impact on Marymount’s reputation; and the contributions of the majors to the university’s overall mission.
“If they want to change the mission, then say that and say what that change is,” Economos said. “But getting rid of theology and religious studies at a Catholic university, that doesn’t fit with the mission.”
Economos calculated, based on average enrollment in the nine majors over the past five years and the results of a survey by the School of Humanities asking whether students would leave the university without those majors, that Marymount could lose as much as $2.74 million in tuition, room, and board revenue.
In an emailed statement, Marymount spokesperson Nicholas Munson wrote that Marymount’s mission is “unchanged,” but that the institution would be making changes “to better position the university for long-term growth and success.” He said these specific changes were “not financially driven” but would allow the university “to redeploy resources” toward majors with growing student interest.
“We believe investing in programs that appeal to students and prepare them for highly sought-after professions is not only our mission but our responsibility,” Munson said.
Students are calling for the president of Connecticut College to resign over her handling of a fundraising event that had been scheduled for last week at a Florida social club with a history of racism and antisemitism.
Katherine Bergeron, who has been president since 2014, canceled the event after facing criticism, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The college’s dean of institutional equity and inclusion resigned a day later. Over the past week, broader concerns have emerged about diversity, equity, and inclusion at the small liberal-arts institution, as well as about Bergeron’s leadership.
A fiery letter from the now-former dean, Rodmon Cedric King, described a “toxic administrative culture of fear and intimidation” at the college. Students and alumni have started organizing on social media. Meanwhile, the Board of Trustees affirmed its support for Bergeron over the weekend and promised to commission an outside review of the college’s DEI efforts.
Leo Saperstein, a sophomore at Connecticut College, said that many students want Bergeron to resign. He said they are concerned that DEI staff aren’t being supported by college leaders.
“The staffers are not being paid enough, they’re not given the respect they deserve, and they are completely and almost always overlooked,” he said.
A student group called Black Voices Conn Coll is planning a lock-in protest, writing in an Instagram post that Bergeron’s commitment to DEI “is nothing but performative.” An alumni group, CC Alums Against Hate, created an online petition, which as of Wednesday had collected over 90 signatures demanding Bergeron’s resignation.
Connecticut College’s choice of location for the fundraiser — the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, Fla. — and the criticism that followed from students was first reported by The College Voice, the campus newspaper. The club has a history of excluding Black and Jewish individuals from its membership. Singer Sammy Davis Jr. was denied entry to the building.
Bergeron canceled the event on February 6 when she was already in Florida preparing for it, according to the newspaper. King resigned from his position as dean on February 7, having held the position for just over a year.
Bergeron issued an apology to the campus community on February 8, and described King’s resignation as a loss to the college. She also said that diversity, equity, and inclusion work is “fundamental” to the institution.
“Full participation is a core value at Conn, which is why I regret our decision to schedule an event at a location whose history and reputation suggest otherwise,” she wrote. “We made that decision believing that our values were clear.”
Before her role as president, Bergeron was dean of the College at Brown University for seven years. A spokesperson for Connecticut College declined to make Bergeron available for an interview.
In his letter to the chair and vice chair of the college’s Board of Trustees, King wrote that Bergeron had bullied senior administrators, behavior that he concluded had been a fixture of her time as president. He also wrote that employees’ fear of angering Bergeron had created a “toxic administrative culture of fear and intimidation.”
Administrators are in the midst of creating a five-year financial plan for the college, one that King described as “compromised” by that very culture, keeping campus officials from being honest about financial projections.
“I am taking on significant personal and professional risk in writing to you. I fully expect some form of retaliation against me for sharing the information in this letter and in my letter of resignation,” King wrote.
Since 2021, at least six other DEI staff members have left the college, including four program directors, a Title IX coordinator, and King’s predecessor, John F. McKnight Jr., who was dean of institutional equity and inclusion from 2016 until 2021.
Debo P. Adegbile, chair of the college’s board, sent a letter to the campus community on Sunday, reaffirming the college’s commitment to DEI initiatives and expressing support for Bergeron’s leadership.
Adegbile also said that the board would be making further investments in the college’s Equity and Inclusion Action Plan based on feedback from the community and an outside review’s findings. Trustees are also planning to meet with faculty, staff, students, and alumni this week to begin conversations about DEI at the college.
Saperstein said he has noticed one positive development over the past few days: Students from all backgrounds have rallied together, which has had a positive impact on the campus.
“I’m really happy about the fact that people are coming together,” he said. “That this issue is bringing people together and not pitting us apart is something really beautiful.”
Last week, a governor had a strong message for public colleges in his state: Get ready for a world without Covid-relief funding.
Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut, a Democrat, has directed substantial cuts to higher ed in his state-budget proposal for the 2024 fiscal year. Lamont’s chief budget official toldCT Mirror that the influx of federal money that’s poured in over the last three years was always temporary, and that colleges should have planned accordingly.
The governor’s proposal hasn’t sat well with higher-ed leaders. Radenka Maric, the University of Connecticut’s president, estimated that her campus could lose $160 million in state funding next year. In response, Maric has threatened to sever ties with the arena in Hartford where the basketball team typically plays, according to TheDaily Campus, the student newspaper, citing, in part, that the costs of the arena deal benefit the state and local businesses more than the university.
Mason Holland, UConn’s student-body president, called on students to walk out of class on Wednesday and travel to the state capitol to protest the cuts.
Colleges received more than $76 billion from three Covid-relief measures passed by Congress in 2020 and 2021. The aid allowed many colleges to keep students enrolled and maintain critical programs throughout the pandemic, while also scaling up investments in mental-health counselors, basic-needs resources, and other student-support initiatives.
But that aid has mostly run out and will end entirely in a few months, leaving some colleges scrambling to find funding to cover the rising cost of operations. That challenge has come into sharp relief in Connecticut, where the state’s financial realities raise serious questions about how colleges can adjust.
Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, said declines in enrollment, the rising cost of facility maintenance and utilities, and salary increases for faculty and staff are driving increasing costs.
The University of Connecticut originally received a one-time $28.4-million infusion of direct pandemic-related aid, which university officials said they distributed through grants to students and used to cover pandemic-related costs during the 2022 fiscal year. After Connecticut policy makers negotiated salary increases with public employees, state officials also gave colleges additional funding from the American Rescue Plan in 2023 to help cover the costs.
Instead of states using their budget surpluses to make those investments in higher education, many states have been engaged in a race to the bottom with tax cuts.
This year, UConn leaders again requested more state funding to help cover those employee-related costs, which will grow next year. But by the looks of Lamont’s budget, that isn’t going to happen.
The proposal would decrease higher-ed funding over the next two fiscal years — amounting to a $159.6-million budget reduction at UConn next year and a $197.1-million reduction the following year based on a preliminary review, according to Maric.
“The appropriations proposed for UConn and UConn Health fall far short of what is necessary to adequately fund the university, carry out our critical public health mission most effectively, and fully cover the sizable costs the state seeks to pass along to us,” Maric said in a letter to the university community last week.
Terrence Cheng, president of Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, said the proposal has the potential to create “long-term harm” to the state’s institutions.
Lamont’s office didn’t respond to several requests for comment from The Chronicle.
As Kelchen sees it, economic challenges are a key driver of what’s happening in Connecticut.
“Covid-relief funding helped plug a lot of gaps in states with budget challenges, and Connecticut is one of the states that hasn’t seen the growth and the revenue that other states have seen during the last couple of years,” Kelchen said.
Beyond Connecticut, states across the country are considering tax cuts that would exacerbate higher-ed funding problems, said Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
“Instead of states using their budget surpluses to make those investments in higher education, many states have been engaged in a race to the bottom with tax cuts,” Harnisch said. “This will affect the ability of states to make investments in key priorities such as higher education when the economy slows down, and federal funds disappear.”
If UConn were to try and cover the cost of these potential shortfalls by raising tuition, that would mean an increase of 19 percent — or $3,000 — per student next year, Maric said.
“We simply cannot provide less while asking our students to pay more,” Maric said.
Raising tuition is one way to alleviate financial pressures, both Kelchen and Harnisch noted. That isn’t always an option in states where the legislature or state governing board controls tuition. Colleges have the authority to raise tuition in Connecticut, but Harnisch said that approach has drawbacks.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” Harnisch said. “Unfortunately, it ends with students taking on more debt.”
The provost of Metropolitan State University of Denver is stepping down after the institution’s Board of Trustees put on hold a plan to reduce faculty workload that he’d advocated.
Faculty members at MSU-Denver had for decades talked about cutting down workloads, not simply the teaching load, and Alfred W. Tatum saidthat he’d “embraced” the project “as my supreme charge as provost.” Under a proposal backed by Tatum and the Faculty Senate, most tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members would go from teaching four classes per semester to three, without an accompanying increase in research or service expectations, beginning this fall. The goal of the proposal was to enable the faculty to “maintain the vitality of its programs while affording faculty the time to think innovatively to revise academic programs when warranted to best serve the needs and aspirations of traditional, non-traditional, and transfer students,” Tatum wrote.
But concerns about the plan’s long-term financial viability prompted MSU-Denver’s board to pause the plan, highlighting the tension between two pandemic-driven forces that have dominated higher ed in the past three years — faculty burnout and financial constraint.
The decision to delay the plan, months before it was set to go into effect, came as a shock to faculty and administrators, Colorado Public Radio reported. But the board thought it didn’t have adequate information to move forward, Kristin Hultquist, the vice chair, told The Chronicle. After hearing a presentation from Tatum in late January about how the plan would be rolled out — including the hiring of about 78 new faculty members at a cost of $7.4 million in the 2023 fiscal year — board members posed questions about its long-term financial implications and about whether the plan would impede MSU-Denver’s ability to pay faculty well.
“We reached the conclusion that we didn’t have, ourselves as a board, the level of information we needed to take this significant step,” Hultquist said. “So we asked our president, ‘Do you have the information you need to make a recommendation?’ And she told us, ‘Frankly, I don’t.’” Together, Hultquist said, the board and the university’s president, Janine A. Davidson, decided they needed more time and information.
‘Can We Afford It?’
The idea of reducing workload has been a goal for “close to 20 years,” Tatum wrote in the proposal. “This request hit a crescendo during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Hultquist acknowledged that the board knew that cutting workload was a “stated priority” of MSU-Denver’s Faculty Senate. “This is not a brand-new conversation for us. But what is important is that the strategic decision to extend this policy to all of our tenure and tenure-line faculty is really a significant budget question, and significant budget questions are the fiduciary responsibility of the board,” she said.
At the same time, she added, among the board’s priorities is ensuring that faculty members feel valued and that their concerns about workload and pandemic-induced fatigue are heard. “While we deeply understand and respect that this would be a good direction for our faculty and for our students, it’s, Can we afford it? How much can we afford, and what can we afford now?” Hultquist said. She cited enrollment declines and low state funding — among states, Colorado had the second-lowest allocation of higher-education funding per student in 2021, according to federal data — as additional constraints on the institution’s budget.
In a memo on January 31, Davidson informed faculty members the plan was being delayed, noting the board believed it could have “critical implications for budget and mission.” That announcement was met with consternation from many who’d already begun planning fall schedules, CPR reported. But Hultquist said she’s also heard from faculty who favor the pause.
Davidson’s memo said that the board would discuss the issue at its fall retreat, though Hultquist said a decision could come sooner. “If we have the information we need before then, we’ll make a decision before then,” she said.
In the meantime, MSU-Denver faces the loss of Tatum, who commissioned a committee to explore the possibility of trimming faculty obligations shortly after his arrival in 2021. That group’s recommendations were approved by the Faculty Senate, and endorsed by Tatum, in March 2022. He had also earmarked about $3 million in faculty savings to put toward the plan’s $7.4-million cost.
Even in deciding to step down, Tatum threw his support behind the plan. “I am convinced that our students will be the beneficiaries, and the university could enact fiscal stewardships to honor the faculty’s decades-old request as we diversify our resources,” he said in a statement to The Chronicle. “I am convinced my university colleagues will ultimately move in this direction as they gather more fiscal certainty.”
Tatum, a scholar of literacy development in Black boys, will remain on the faculty, and he told The Chronicle he “could no longer resist my sacred calling to become a professor again.” Hultquist said she respected Tatum’s decision to step down. Marie Mora, the deputy provost, will serve as interim provost beginning March 16, according to a university statement.
Four faculty leaders said they’ll continue pushing for lesser workloads despite Tatum’s departure. In a statement to The Chronicle, these leaders vowed to “conduct the necessary data analysis and discussions to end the pause and move forward with an improved workload model,” said Meredith L. Jeffers, Liz Goodnick, Elizabeth Ribble, and Sheila Rucki. The four wrote in a statement earlier this week that a reduced teaching load “would provide faculty the opportunity to engage more deeply with their student-centered pedagogy and invest more time and energy in student interactions beyond the classroom, including activities related to recruitment and improving student retention.”
Abolish race-conscious practices. End “leftist indoctrination.” Fix what’s wrong with higher education in America. Those have been the long-stated goals of Republican governors, lawmakers, and activists who, empowered by voters and operating under state law, have for decades sought to remake the ideological climate on college campuses by taking control of the boards that govern public institutions.
But what happens when the actions of these boards violate long-established rules and norms regarding institutional governance, and in turn begin to imperil a public university or college’s financial and operational well-being?
That’s what could happen at North Idaho College, a 4,500-student community college that sits 13 miles from the state’s northwestern border. After three years of board interference and dysfunction, it now finds itself facing down a threat from its accreditor of a “show-cause” sanction — which would functionally be a final warning to the college to shape up or risk termination of its accreditation from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities.
And it’s the board itself that has put the college’s accreditation at greater risk. In a Dec. 17 letter, the commission warned that “recent and subsequent public actions” of the college’s board “appear to place the institution at significant risk of being out of compliance with a number of NWCCU Eligibility Requirements and Standards.”
Without accreditation, students enrolled at the college would be ineligible to participate in federal financial-aid programs to pay for their education there. For most institutions, this loss of access to federal dollars functionally serves as a death sentence. The “show-cause” threat follows a warning letter from NWCCU last April.
Since 2016, only two public institutions of higher education in the mainland U.S. have ever been targeted with a “show-cause” sanction by their institutional accreditor, according to a Chronicle analysis.
Now, uncertainty abounds. Will the threat of accreditor action curtail the board’s penchant for casting aside presidents? And, if not, will the commission actually withdraw the institution’s accreditation, even if it means the end of North Idaho College? And how will other interested parties — like state regulators and legislators, future insurers, crediting-rating agencies, the U.S. Department of Education, and even other accreditors — factor in?
What higher ed can count on, said Sondra Barringer, an assistant professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University, are more standoffs like the one at North Idaho College between activist-minded boards at public colleges and the organizations that accredit those institutions.
No one knows where the next showdown will break out. But another board-governance affair reminiscent of the NIC saga played out at New College of Florida on Tuesday. A new board majority — appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to remake the institution into a “Hillsdale of the South” that rejects “trendy” political views — voted to fire the college’s president, and replace her in the interim with a former Republican Florida House speaker and close DeSantis ally.
‘Deep State’
The story of how this small Idaho college came to the brink of losing accreditation goes back a ways, but the roots of the latest chapter can be traced back to the ouster of Rick MacLennan, the then-president of five years. NWCCU issued a warning letter in April 2022, citing “persistent issues with governance at the institution” and alerting the college’s board that it was out of compliance with the accreditor’s policies. Around the same time, the Idaho State Board of Education appointed three new trustees to the college’s board to restore a quorum until November, when the three seats would go up for election.
The three state-appointed trustees were seated alongside incumbent members Todd Banducci and Greg McKenzie, who had both voted to fire MacLennan without cause — an apparent counterstrike against the “NIC ‘deep state,’” which Banducci had previously described in an email to a student.
The three new appointees, who formed a new majority, also did not sit well with Banducci, who essentially characterized the move as a hostile takeover of the board he chaired.
“They are moving at lightning speed to cram it down our throats!!” Banducci reportedly wrote on his Facebook page. “They are trying to take it out of the hands of the voters. Pushing through their agenda via bureaucratic fiat.”
Over Banducci and McKenzie’s objections, the new board moved quickly to appoint Nick Swayne, the executive director of a Virginia-based partnership between the state’s eight public universities, as North Idaho’s new president. He replaced Interim President Michael Sebaaly — who had gotten an unusual promotion, thanks to support from Banducci and McKenzie, from college wrestling coach to college president.
Newly aggrieved, Banducci, McKenzie, and their allies set their sights on restoring their board majority come election time. But first, their coalition would need to assuage any concerns that voters might have about the college’s accreditation. McKenzie argued in a campaign missive that any talk of accreditation loss for NIC was overblown.
“What about accreditation?” McKenzie reportedly wrote before the general election. “Isn’t it still at risk? No, that was Fake News. Accreditation has never been ‘at risk’ and the only remaining item on the accreditation agencies request list is to hire a full-time Vice President, anticipated to be completed mid-November.”
Art Macomber, a local lawyer and failed Republican attorney-general candidate, echoed similar sentiments in a Coeur d’Alene Press guest column published before the election.
“The scare tactic complaints about NIC’s accreditation seem to be a smokescreen,” Macomber wrote.
Banducci and McKenzie needed just one of their three preferred candidates to win at the ballot box in order to re-establish their majority on the five-seat board. And despite a $140,000 campaign war chest backing a slate of candidates endorsed by the regional Chamber of Commerce, Banducci and McKenzie were in the end able to secure their all-important third vote.
Not wasting any time, at a December 8 board meeting, Banducci, McKenzie, and newly elected Mike Waggoner voted to immediately place President Nick Swayne on administrative leave (he promptly sued, looking to be reinstated).
Critics alleged the board’s action had violated Idaho’s open-meetings law, a violation that the board would concede to in a meeting later that month. Macomber, who by this time was the college’s newly hired lawyer, said the move to place Swayne on administrative leave would allow the board to “investigate things that have arisen of concern that impeded our accreditation success.”
A Rare Move
Ironically, North Idaho College’s decision to place Swayne on leave gave rise to new anxieties about its accreditation.
On December 17, NWCCU penned a letter to the college’s leadership, raising for the first time the prospect that a “show-cause” order could be issued against the institution for its ongoing lack of compliance with the accreditor’s policies. “Show-cause” orders are a relative rarity in higher education, and are almost never levied against public institutions like North Idaho College.
According to a Chronicle analysis, of the 745 “show-cause” orders issued by institutional accreditors since 2016 and on file with the Department of Education, only two mainland public institutions of higher education have ever received such a sanction: Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, a four-year historically black university which had struggled financially in the past (Cheyney’s accreditor has since removed all sanctions against it); and Learey Technical College, a Florida vocational school that is now a part of the Hillsborough County Public Schools system. (All 11 campuses of the University of Puerto Rico were also issued “show-cause” findings in early 2019 after each failed to submit certain financial and regulatory items to the group’s accreditor).
Responding to the accreditor’s letter, North Idaho wrote last month that it had taken numerous steps to rectify issues of noncompliance, such as allowing public comment during regular board meetings. But the board rejected the recommendation of two of college’s administrators, who were then acting as interim chief executives, to bring Swayne back; the board majority cited Swayne’s lawsuit in justifying their refusal.
Instead, the board’s 3-2 majority voted to make Greg South, formerly an interim dean of instruction at NIC, the college’s latest acting president. Under the auspices of the Swayne lawsuit, Macomber issued more than a dozen subpoenas to college employees, former trustees, and others, according to reporting by The Coeur d’Alene Press. TheCoeur d’Alene Press also learned that under Macomber’s arrangement with the college, the lawyer may bill it $325 an hour for his legal services. In December — his first month on the job — the institution paid him $25,000, according to invoices obtained by the paper.
In addition, the credit-ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service decided in late December to place the college’s $7.9 million in debt under review for a possible downgrade, which would make it more expensive for the college to borrow money. In its assessment, Moody’s noted that the dysfunction on the college’s board had resulted in the loss of its insurer. A downgrade could come soon, unless the college demonstrates “meaningful steps taken to stabilize leadership and address accreditor’s concerns,” the notice stated.
“The board members’ very public disputes with one another, college leadership, and external parties are negatively impacting NIC’s brand, which in turn, could negatively impact student demand and operations,” the analyst for Moody’s wrote.
To date, Moody’s has not downgraded its ratings for the college or its debt.
Sonny Ramaswamy, the accreditor’s president, said the commission had not yet prepared a response to the college, which formally replied to the “show-cause” threat on January 4. Ramaswamy declined to answer any specific questions about the college’s accreditation.
Echoing answers he provided to state legislators’ questions last week, South, the new interim president of the college, said in an interview with The Chronicle that he was focused on working with the commission to bring the institution back into compliance with the accreditor’s policies, though he repeatedly noted that NIC remains accredited. South also said that Ramaswamy had advised the college’s leadership to focus on educating students, and avoid speculating on what might or might not come next for the institution.
As for the challenge of working productively with a deeply divided board, South said he believed the trustees were committed to developing relationships and building trust.
“If they weren’t committed to it, I probably wouldn’t have taken the job,” South said.
The Chronicle requested interviews with Banducci, McKenzie, Macomber, and the other board members. A spokesperson for the college offered to forward emailed questions to the group.
In response, McKenzie wrote that the entire institution — board, administration, and employees — were committed to meeting the commission’s expectations. Asked if he bore any responsibility for putting North Idaho College at increased risk of losing its accreditation, McKenzie said he did.
“Everyone in leadership shares responsibility in where the college is at and where we need to go,” McKenzie said. “Being a member of the board governance team and having the accreditation issues relate to governance[,] I share responsibility. Pointing fingers isn’t what our students nor this college needs right now.”
In keeping with Ramaswamy’s advice, Tarie Zimmerman, a trustee in the minority, wrote that the board had not discussed any plans for how the college would respond if NWCCU actually did terminate the college’s accreditation.
Nothing In Between
Board members overseeing public institutions of higher education are increasingly assuming that their roles extend beyond the traditional portfolio of fiduciary responsibility and long-term strategic management, said Barringer, the professor at Southern Methodist. In some cases, it’s activist-minded boards motivated by ideological objectives. But Barringer also pointed to examples of board-president conflicts that arose from interpersonal disputes, like at Texas Southern University. In 2020, the university’s board voted to give themselves the power to fire any and all campus employees, a month after placing its then-president on administrative leave.
Because public colleges and universities like North Idaho College so rarely test the limits of their relationships with accreditors, what happens next at the institution will likely provide valuable insight into how much upheaval a body like NWCCU is willing to accept before it completely loses trust in a governing board. “We don’t have a line in terms of how far activist boards can go, and this could help establish a line for this accreditor in terms of how far it is willing to let the board go,” Barringer said.
And each possible move by the accreditor can in turn beget a different series of options available to the college, said Robert Kelchen, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
Withdrawing accreditation is a significant step that would carry risk for North Idaho, its students, and the commission itself. Kelchen said he suspected that even if the accreditor were to issue a “show-cause” sanction against North Idaho, it would not go beyond this step and actually cut off students’ access to federal student-aid dollars. Despite all the different names for different types of sanctions, Kelchen said accreditors actually only have a limited number of tools to tame board behavior.
“The tools in their arsenal jump from rubber mallet to sledgehammer. There’s really nothing in between,” Kelchen said. “They can require a bunch of documents to be provided. They can require a plan. But at the end of the day, you are either accredited, or you’re not.”
But even if the commission were to withdraw accreditation, North Idaho would still have options. It could file a lawsuit to compel reaccreditation, or rely on allies and sympathizers in the media, within Congress, at the Idaho Legislature, or on the federal committee that evaluates accreditors to pressure the commission to restore the institution’s access to federal aid.
The college could also elect to shop around for a new accreditor, Kelchen said. But that’s no guarantee, either. And even if a different accreditor did accept North Idaho College’s membership, could the board finally bring itself to follow the rules?
Daniel Pullin is the next president of Texas Christian U.
CHIEF EXECUTIVES Appointments Kim E. Armstrong,vice chancellor for student, equity, and community affairs at Arkansas State University-Three Rivers, has been named president of Clovis Community College, in California.
David Doré,president of campuses and executive vice chancellor for student experience and work-force development at Pima Community College, in Arizona, has been named chancellor of the Virginia Community College system.
David Guzick,senior vice president for health affairs at the University of Florida and president of UF Health, has been named president of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center at Shreveport.
Mirta Martin,former president of Fairmont State University, in West Virginia, has been named interim president of Ferrum College, in Virginia.
Calvin McFadden Sr., a former chief of student affairs at Norwalk Community College, in Connecticut, has been named president of Arkansas Baptist College.
Colin Neill, interim chancellor of Pennsylvania State University-Great Valley, has been named to the post permanently.
Art Pimentel,president of Woodland Community College, has been named president of Folsom Lake College, part of the Los Rios Community College District in California.
Daniel Pullin, dean of the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, has been named president of the university.
Karen Riley,provost at Regis University, in Colorado, has been named president of Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She will succeed William Behre, who plans to retire at the end of June.
Robert K. Vischer,interim president of the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, has been named to the post permanently.
Resignations David K. Balkin,president of Erie Community College of the State University of New York, has resigned after being suspended by the Board of Trustees.
Mark Biermann,president of Blackburn College, in Illinois, has stepped down due to health concerns.
Ted Raspiller,president of Brightpoint Community College, in Virginia, plans to resign in February.
Elwood Robinson,chancellor of Winston-Salem State University, part of the University of North Carolina system, plans to step down at the end of the semester.
Meredith Jung-En Woo, president of Sweet Briar College, in Virginia, plans to step down at the end of the 2023-24 academic year.
Retirements Clarence D. Armbrister, president of Johnson C. Smith University, in North Carolina, plans to retire in June.
Ronnie Green,chancellor of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, plans to retire in June.
CHIEF ACADEMIC OFFICERS Appointments Laurie Elish-Piper,dean of the College of Education at Northern Illinois University, has been named interim executive vice president and provost.
Katherine L. Gantz, interim provost and dean of faculty at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has been named vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculty.
Patrick Wolfe,dean of the College of Science and a professor of statistics and computer science at Purdue University at West Lafayette, has been named provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and diversity.
OTHER TOP ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Robert B. Ahdieh, dean of the School of Law at Texas A&M University, has been named the university’s vice president for professional schools and programs.
Nicole J. Johnson
Brandon A. Frye,vice president for student affairs at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Texas, has been named vice chancellor for student affairs at East Carolina University.
Nicole J. Johnson,dean of students and associate vice president for student affairs at Goucher College, in Maryland, has been named vice president for student life at Rhodes College, in Tennessee.
Todd Lineburger, associate vice president and special adviser for strategic-advancement communications at the Rutgers University Foundation, has been named vice president for communications and marketing at Muhlenberg College, in Pennsylvania.
DEANS Appointments Lisa R. Carter,vice provost for libraries and university librarian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been named university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Thomas Dunne,deputy dean of students at Princeton University, has been named dean of students at Harvard University.
Levon Esters,associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion and of faculty affairs at Purdue University’s Polytechnic Institute and a professor of agricultural-sciences education, has been named dean of the Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.
Catherine Heyman, an associate professor and associate dean of student affairs at Marshall B. Ketchum University’s Southern California College of Optometry, has been named dean of the School of Optometry at High Point University, in North Carolina.
Martha Hurley, chair and a professor in the department of criminal justice and security studies at the University of Dayton, has been named dean of the division of liberal arts, communication, and social sciences at Sinclair Community College, in Ohio.
Mary Loeffelholz, a former dean of the College of Professional Studies and a professor of English at Northeastern University, has been named dean of the School of Continuing Education at Cornell University.
Andy Morgan,associate vice president for student affairs at Indiana State University, has been named associate vice president and dean of students at Illinois State University.
Daniel J. Pack,dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has been named dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Baylor University, in Texas.
Steve Prudent,director of high-school partnerships and pathways at Bunker Hill Community College, has been named dean of admissions and early college at Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, in Massachusetts.
Arturo P. Saavedra,chair of the department of dermatology at the University of Virginia and president and interim chief executive of the UVA Physicians Group, has been named dean of the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University and executive vice president for medical affairs for the VCU Health System.
Nate Y. Sharp, head of the department of accounting in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University at College Station, has been named dean of the college.
Anna Westerstahl Stenport, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York, has been named dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia.
Danelle Stevens-Watkins,associate vice president for research, diversity, and inclusion and a professor in the department of educational, school, and counseling psychology at the University of Kentucky, has been named acting dean of the College of Education.
OTHER ADMINISTRATORS Appointments Megan Callow,associate teaching professor in the department of English at the University of Washington, has been named the university’s inaugural director of writing.
Chris Emmanuel, deputy director of policy in the Executive Office of the Governor of Florida’s Office of Policy and Budget, has been named director of government relations at the University of Florida.
Susan Gross
Susan Gross,assistant vice president for enrollment management at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey, has been named vice provost for enrollment management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Ryan Hudes, associate dean of strategy, enrollment, and administration in the College of Communication and the Arts at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, has been named senior associate dean of strategy, planning, and administration in its College of Human Development, Culture, and Media.
Keona Lewis, associate director of research and evaluation for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been named assistant provost for academic diversity and inclusion at the University of Notre Dame.
Fredrick Muyia Nafukho,senior associate dean of faculty affairs and a professor of educational administration and human-resources development at Texas A&M University at College Station, has been named vice provost for the Office of Academic Personnel at the University of Washington.
Renee Robinson, interim dean of the College of Communication and the Arts at Seton Hall University, in New Jersey, has been named vice dean of faculty affairs in the College of Human Development, Culture, and Media.
Kent Michael Smith, deputy director of the Madison Museum of Modern Art, in Wisconsin, has been named director of the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University.
Brad L.R. Spielman, associate provost for student services at Des Moines Area Community College, in Iowa, has been named director of the Center for Academic Engagement at Guilford Technical Community College, in North Carolina.
Retirements Stephen Fain,chair of the Ignite campaign at the Florida International University Foundation, is retiring after more than 50 years at the university.
FACULTY Appointments Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state and U.S. senator, has been named a professor of practice in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a presidential fellow at Columbia World Projects.
ORGANIZATIONS Appointments Fanta Aw,vice president for undergraduate enrollment, campus life, and inclusive excellence at American University, in Washington, D.C., has been named executive director and chief executive of NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
DEATHS Russell Banks,an author who taught at New England College and Princeton University, among other institutions, died on January 8. He was 82.
Molly Corbett Broad, a former president of the University of North Carolina system, died on January 2. She was 81. Broad served as system president from 1997 to 2005 and was the first woman to lead the American Council on Education.
Jean Franco,a professor of Latin American studies who taught at Stanford University and Columbia University, died on December 14. She was 98.
Willard Gaylin, a co-founder of the Hastings Center with Daniel Callahan, died on December 30. He was 97. Gaylin also served as a professor of psychiatry and law at Columbia University’s Law School.
Stephanie Hammitt,the first female president of Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, in Minnesota, died on November 14. She was 60.
Albert Madansky, a professor in the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, died on December 8. He was 88.
Herbert Morris,a professor emeritus in the School of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles, died on December 14. He was 94.
Theresa A. Powell,vice president for student affairs at Temple University, died on January 2.
Georgia Clark Sadler,the U.S. Naval Academy’s first female instructor, died on November 30. She was 81.
Menahem Schmelzer,a former professor and chief librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary, in New York, died on December 10. He was 88.
Meredith Smith,a former member of the admissions staff at Elon University, in North Carolina, died on November 27. She was 35.
Susan Smyth,dean of the College of Medicine and executive vice chancellor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, died on December 31. She was 57.
Bates College occupies a fairly rarefied perch in higher education. Around half the freshmen who attend the small private college in Maine pay the full $78,000 price tag for tuition and room and board. It boasts a 14-percent acceptance rate, has increased its application volume by 41 percent over the past decade, and maintains an endowment valued at over $400 million.
And so it raised eyebrows last week when Bates announced that it would be cutting its programmatic, non-personnel spending by 5 percent this year. Typically, institutional announcements about the need to cut costs tend to be accompanied by dire warnings about the financial road ahead. But this doesn’t seem to be the case at Bates, where Geoffrey S. Swift, the vice president for finance and administration, described the college’s financial fundamentals as healthy. “It may seem contradictory to hear that the college is financially strong, while also communicating increasing economic stress,” he acknowledged.
“But the economic environment is changing, and we need to prepare ourselves to adapt to new circumstances,” Swift went on to write.
What are those changing circumstances, and what does Bates’s assessment of the economic environment suggest about the road ahead for higher ed? Here are some takeaways:
Yes, Bates is financially strong.
A lot of private institutions in the Northeast are facing increasing competition for students. But enrollment at Bates, which is entirely undergraduate, has remained stable throughout the pandemic, at about 1,800 students. And, while the average discount rate at private colleges soared to 49 percent for undergraduates in 2021-22, at Bates it’s between 25 and 30 percent. Last August, the college concluded a five-year, $345-million fundraising campaign. Those gifts and pledges, paired with historic investment returns from the college’s endowment, yielded an additional $3.1-million allocation from that pool of funds. All told, Bates anticipated drawing $20 million in 2022-23 from its endowment to help cover its $130-million operating budget.
But the effects of inflation are real.
Since the 2020 fiscal year, Bates’s operating costs have grown by $15 million, largelypropelled by rising instructional costs as well as spending on student services and auxiliary enterprises. Swift also said the institution had budgeted an additional $1 million for employee health care and another $1 million for utilities.
“We are experiencing pressure on health care, utilities, food, travel, and other core costs that are growing faster than our ability to increase revenues,” Swift wrote.
Starting in 2021, the costs of goods and services nationwide started to rise at rates reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s. And for the entirety of 2022, the year-over-year inflation rate never fell below 7 percent, eventually topping 9 percent last June.
Bates is hardly alone in confronting inflationary pressures. In Iowa, regents overseeing the state’s three public universities voted to raise tuition by 4.25 percent, citing inflation as a cause. Trustees at Pennsylvania State University took a similar approach, approving a 5-percent tuition-rate increase. And Robert A. Brown, president of Boston University, had this to say when he announced that tuition would go up by 4.25 percent for the coming academic year: “We are caught in an inflationary vise.”
The cost of paying staff has increased as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages and salaries for higher ed’s work force rose nearly 4 percent between the third quarters of 2021 and 2022, though for workers, the buying power of their pay actually fell by 4 percent during the same period.
In recent years, tuition hasn’t risen as fast as inflation has.
While inflation has soared, tuition costs across the country barely budged, a continuation of a decade’s long trend. Between August 2021 and August 2022, out-of-pocket college-tuition costs for households climbed by 2.79 percent during that 12-month span, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis.
This has been true at Bates, too. The single fee (tuition, room and board) has grown at about 3 percent per year. The college is aware that rising costs in the economy have also proved challenging to current and prospective students, said Mary Pols, a spokeswoman for the college. That’s all the more reason, she said, that Bates needed to keep increases to its single fee as reasonable as possible.
Administrators and faculty at Bates have a lot to navigate.
How exactly such spending cuts are to be implemented remains a cause for concern for some Bates faculty members, like Keiko Konoeda, a lecturer in Japanese. Konoeda said she would like the college’s work force to be more involved in the decision-making process that led Bates to reassess its budget projections. In October 2021, a group of employees at Bates sought authorization from the National Labor Relations Board to form a union with the Maine Service Employees Association. Konoeda, a supporter of this pro-unionization effort, said she believed a unionized Bates labor force would afford the college’s employees greater input on financial matters at the institution.
“Our unionization drive isn’t only about asking for pay or better compensation, but it is coming out of the overall lack of communication or our involvement in decision-making.”
Bates has argued that the formation of a union would change the relationship between the college and its employees from “one where you negotiate the terms of your employment individually with your manager to a process where an outside party represents your interests as part of a group.”
Beyond the specific questions regarding unionization and labor, institutions that find themselves in situations like that of Bates tend to find savings through the regular cycle of attrition of its workers. Another strategy: reducing institutional financial-aid packages, said Phillip B. Levine, an economist at Wellesley College who has studied post-secondary-education pricing. This way, the sticker price at an institution remains stagnant, but the cost to students or their families rises. But there’s a tradeoff — lower tuition discounting can reduce college-attendance rates overall.
“If you charge people more than they can afford, they can’t go,” Levine said.
College is a high-priced liberal indoctrination program where radical professors and administrators quash the speech of conservatives and promote outlandish ideas like critical race theory. Meanwhile, students rack up six-figure debts to get degrees in esoteric subjects with no job prospects — a waste of time and tax dollars.
The conservative bill of indictment against higher education is longstanding and, according to public-opinion surveys, gaining in adherents.
But there’s one man many conservative critics of higher ed have learned to love: Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., who led Purdue University for a decade, stepping down as president at the end of last year. They laud his focus on freezing tuition and providing affordable degrees in valuable STEM subjects, as well as his decision to adopt a campus-speech policy that encourages “free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.”
“As a general matter, if more universities operated the way Purdue has operated, satisfaction would be much higher,” said Lindsay Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
At a moment when higher education is under constant fire from partisan detractors and the college degree has itself become a central dividing line in American politics, is Daniels’s tenure at Purdue a model for how to effectively lead a public university through fraught times? And is Daniels, a former Republican governor of Indiana, an antidote to growing conservative disfavor of higher education?
Sitting in his office wearing a Purdue-themed, plaid button-down, Daniels insisted that he had eschewed partisan political activity while leading Purdue, and that his intent had never been to prescribe policies to other institutions. “I never used the ‘C’ or ‘L’ word, almost never the ‘R’ or ‘D’ word,” he said during an interview in early December at Purdue’s main administrative building, “but, you know, I was always trying to emphasize bringing people together.”
That’s not to say he would mind if other universities followed his model. “Could Purdue serve as some sort of a corrective or a counterexample? I’d be very proud if that happened,” Daniels said. “I’m a big believer in higher education and its importance to the country and the importance that we maintain the best network of institutions in the world. And that’s exactly why I think its shortcomings are worth worrying about trying to improve.”
He changed Purdue, but I’m not convinced he changed the university presidency as a job.
Even his critics acknowledge that Daniels has been a significant president — his name is often mentioned alongside reformers like Michael Crow at Arizona State University. But they also point out that what works for a major research university wouldn’t work at most other colleges, which have more limited resources. On Purdue’s West Lafayette campus, Daniels is not immune from criticism. He is accused of shortchanging faculty pay and benefits to freeze tuition and allowing hate speech to flourish in the name of free expression. Some of Daniels’s efforts to make the university more entrepreneurial have also fallen short.
“He’s a former governor, he knows how to get things done,” said Barrett Taylor, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Texas. “He changed Purdue, but I’m not convinced he changed the university presidency as a job.”
Conservatives have long held suspicions about the role and value of higher education, but its emergence as a national wedge issue has intensified since the 2016 presidential election, in particular over how colleges have sought to diversify their student bodies.
Polls show deep and growing discontent about college among conservatives across the country. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that nearly 60 percent of those who identified as Republican thought colleges had a negative effect on the nation. By 2021 that figure had increased to 64 percent.
Polling from Pew has also found that conservatives overwhelmingly believe professors bring their liberal political and social views into the classroom. State legislatures have passed laws to restrict how race and racism are taught, and to limit how institutions train employees on those topics.
As a candidate, Donald J. Trump dragged higher education onto the front lines of the culture wars, painting colleges as bastions of progressive groupthink hostile to conservative viewpoints. Trump also rolled back protections for LGBTQ students and, in 2019, signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to ensure that institutions receiving federal research grants were properly protecting free inquiry. At the signing ceremony, Trump introduced several college students who alleged that they had been punished for their political views.
The partisan divide on higher education is also reflected in voters’ college attainment. Nearly 60 percent of those with a college degree now identify as or lean Democratic, according to the Pew Research Center, and those without a college degree are flocking to the Republican Party.
One thing that’s totally alienated a lot of people to many higher-ed institutions is the enforced conformity of thought; the uniformity of thought.
So far, no laws restricting instruction on “divisive topics” such as race, gender, and sexuality have been passed in Indiana, though several were proposed, according to the free-expression advocacy group PEN America, which tracks such legislation. Nationwide, nearly 20 such measures were signed into law since 2021, including bills in at least 10 states that apply to public colleges.
In an interview, Daniels lamented the overall souring public perception of higher education. “We can’t be happy that people have become dismissive about the whole enterprise,” he said, “or decided that it can’t possibly be worth either the money or the time.” He added that he understands the frustrations of those who argue that campuses are not welcome to a range of political viewpoints. “One thing that’s totally alienated a lot of people to many higher-ed institutions,” he said, “is the enforced conformity of thought; the uniformity of thought.”
On some issues, Daniels is willing to take a strong stand. Republican officials have attacked President Biden’s executive action to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loans as an unconstitutional giveaway to the wealthy and an affront to those who have already paid off their education debts. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in February from six Republican-led states, though not Indiana, that sued to stop the loan-forgiveness plan. In an interview with Fox News, Daniels called the executive order “grossly unfair to those who lived up to their responsibilities or never went to college at all. It’s grotesquely expensive and will aggravate our already terrifying national debt picture.”
Speaking out forcefully on political issues is something few university presidents are willing to do, even on matters that could affect their campuses. A Chronicle survey found that presidents almost invariably self-censor to avoid controversy and political backlash. As a result, they increasingly find themselves caught in the middle of contentious debates on social issues, weighing the relative risks or rewards of taking a public position.
Daniels, on the other hand, has a regular column in The Washington Post in which he airs his views on a wide variety of topics: meddlesome mothers who interfere too much in their children’s college experience, a California law meant to prohibit inhumane conditions on hog farms, and the necessity of reopening Purdue’s campus in the fall of 2020 despite the risks of Covid-19.
Daniels’s willingness to speak out, including to publicly critique higher education, is one of the things that have made Republicans look favorably on Purdue, said Andrew Gillen, a senior policy analyst at the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Having him in leadership, not afraid to put his views out there,” Gillen said, “gave them a reason to trust that if something was wrong, he would tell them.”
Daniels downplays his role as a conservative voice, and in many ways his style of politics is out of step with a party that still largely embraces Trump. Instead, Daniels said that he believes in “politics by addition, not division,” and that making college more welcoming to conservatives, generally, could be one way to stave off enrollment declines.
“Higher education will be better off if more people, you can call them conservatives, start to feel more confidence in it.”
Daniels is part of a still small but persistent trend of politicians who are tapped to lead college campuses. The best-known among these have been the former Democratic governor and U.S. senator David Boren, who served as president of the University of Oklahoma from 1994 to 2018, and Hank Brown, a former Republican U.S. representative and senator who was president of the University of Northern Colorado from 1998 to 2002 and the University of Colorado system from 2005 to 2008.
The skills of a politician can be advantageous for a college president, particularly if that person is good at raising money and enjoys everyday interactions with people. “I sort of brought an affinity for that kind of thing from my last job,” Daniels said. “I always tell people, You know, you’ve got to find a way to stay in touch with the ground level.”
For much of his career, however, Daniels served at the highest levels of both government and corporate leadership. He has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a law degree from Georgetown, and he began his political career working for Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana. Daniels then ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee and became a top political adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Rebecca McElhoe, Courtesy of Purdue University
George W. Bush joins Daniels onstage at a Purdue event in December. Before his election as Indiana’s governor, Daniels served as then-President Bush’s first budget director from 2001 to 2003.
In 1987, Daniels left the White House to lead the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute and three years later became a senior executive for a pharmaceutical company. Daniels served as President George W. Bush’s budget director from 2001 to 2003.
He twice won Indiana’s governorship, in 2004 and again in 2008. At the end of his second term, he briefly considered entering the 2012 presidential race. Instead, another opportunity presented itself: the presidency of Purdue University, where Daniels as governor had appointed or reappointed all 10 members of the Board of Trustees.
Daniels said he was attracted to Purdue because of the opportunity to harness the university’s already strong offerings in science and engineering to generate economic activity for the region. “Anybody can see that in today’s economy, R1s, especially STEM-centric universities, are one of the great assets you can have.”
When he arrived at Purdue, about 45 percent of undergraduates were getting degrees in STEM. That figure has now increased to nearly 70 percent, and for a student body that is about 30 percent larger. In addition, several major corporations have begun to build research and manufacturing facilities near the campus, including Rolls-Royce and Saab, which are partnering with the university’s aerospace engineers. A $1.8-billion semiconductor plant is also in the works.
With the help of the university’s research foundation, housing is being built in West Lafayette for employees of those companies and others to bolster the population and economy in a rural area that might not otherwise attract large industries.
Purdue has also sought to expand its brand nationally. In 2017 the university acquired the for-profit Kaplan University to create the nonprofit online Purdue University Global. But the arrangement has been plagued by concerns that it was too opaque, would dilute the university’s reputation for rigor, and become a drain on its finances. The enterprise did not break even financially until a year ago, according to an analysis by Phil Hill, an education-technology consultant.
The goal of that arrangement, and the focus on affordability, Daniels said, is to uphold Purdue as a steppingstone for students from various backgrounds to improve their lives.
“This is the place where people from the farms, the small towns, the inner cities, you know, have come to a public university,” Daniels said,” and I’ve heard it countless times from people like that: ‘If not for Purdue,’ ‘it started at Purdue,’ ‘I owe it to Purdue.’”
For Daniels, one key to making Purdue a place for the less privileged to succeed has been to make it affordable. Annual in-state tuition has been set at $9,992 for all but three years since he became president. (A $10 fee for the student recreation center briefly pushed the total over $10,000, but the university’s trustees rescinded that at Daniels’ request.)
The tuition freeze and Daniels’s other efforts to control costs are a big reason that Nadra Dunston, a sophomore studying mechanical engineering, admires Daniels. “He’s trying to utilize resources to make it affordable,” said Dunston, who is from West Lafayette, Ind.
What has made that tuition freeze possible is a large increase in enrollment. In addition to overall growth of nearly 30 percent over the past decade, the number of undergraduates from outside Indiana, who pay tuition of up to $29,000, has more than doubled during Daniels’s tenure. (Nonresident tuition has also remained the same since 2013.) Daniels points out that the number of students from Indiana has also increased, though it has fallen from 49 percent of the student body to 40 percent since he became president.
Freezing tuition isn’t unique to Purdue. In this case, the policy underscores Daniels’s background as a politician, noted Rebecca S. Natow, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at Hofstra University. “Tuition freezes are politically popular — they’re popular with students and families, and they’re popular with a lot of voters,” she said. But because of that popularity, they can be hard to undo even when they are no longer financially beneficial.
Moreover, the kinds of policies that made Daniels a successful governor don’t necessarily work in higher education, said Michael J. Hicks, a professor of economics and director of a center for business research at Ball State University, in Muncie, Ind. He pointed to one of Daniels’s chief accomplishments as governor: overhauling the state’s bureau of motor vehicles.
Educating college students isn’t as simple as renewing a driver’s license or registering a vehicle — basic transactions that can often be completed in a few hours or less, said Hicks, who is also on the board of scholars at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which advocates for free-market reforms. “Education would be nice if you could make it more efficient, but the challenge of getting a higher number of people educated isn’t transactional.”
What Daniels did was really good for Purdue but really bad for Indiana.
The real knock on the tuition freeze is that the university has become less accessible to low-income students. In an analysis of college-going rates in Indiana, Hicks found that the net price students were paying had increased at Purdue by nearly $1,200 between 2018 and 2020, but had fallen at the other four large public universities in the state. The reason for that increase is that Purdue is recruiting more affluent and nonresident students who pay the full sticker price of tuition, Hicks argues.
The freeze has undermined outcomes that Daniels argued for as governor, said Hicks, including seeking to improve the share of state residents with a college degree. Since 2015, the college-going rate in Indiana has declined from 65 percent of high-school graduates to 53 percent in 2020, according to Hicks’s analysis. That decline — 12 percentage points — is double the national average, Hicks found.
“What Daniels did was really good for Purdue,” Hicks said, “but really bad for Indiana.”
Another free-market idea meant to reduce the burden of federal student loans was Purdue’s income-share agreements, which offered students money for college. In return, students agreed to repay a share of their income to private investors after graduating and getting a job.
Over seven years, the program provided about $21 million to roughly 1,000 students. But the program was suspended in June after complaints from several students that the repayment terms were confusing and far more costly than they expected. In some cases, students could end up repaying 250 percent of the original amount they borrowed — far more than would have been required for a federal student loan.
A major pillar of Daniels’s legacy at Purdue is his commitment to free speech, which he describes as central to the mission of a university.
“Knowledge advances through the collision of ideas,” Daniels said during an interview, “and when on any subject, but especially science and so forth, when somebody says, ‘There’s one answer and only one answer, and we don’t want anybody here who doesn’t agree with that answer,’ you know, that’s anti-intellectual, that’s anti-academic.”
His stance echoes a chief complaint among conservative activists: that higher education is a progressive echo chamber that shuts out dissenting views.
In 2015 the university’s Board of Trustees made Purdue the first public institution to adopt the “Chicago principles,” guidelines meant to protect free expression on campus, even speech that many would find offensive or threatening. The following year Purdue began what is believed to be the first freshman orientation program dedicated to free speech. Role-playing exercises and skits demonstrate how students can react to speech they may find insulting.
If students aren’t occasionally hearing something that offends them “there’s no free speech out there,” said Gary J. Lehman, a member of the Board of Trustees who graduated from Purdue in 1974.
Spencer Johnson, a senior and the communications director of Purdue’s College Republicans, described a campus environment where a variety of political perspectives are shared and debated. “We don’t face massive pushback on our club’s simply existing,” said Johnson, “and really you’re free to express your ideas in class. You might have peers kind of balk at more conservative ideology … but for the most part, the professors aren’t hostile towards it.”
Other students feel that the university has gone too far and protects individuals who make them feel unsafe.
Rob Weiner, a doctoral student in agricultural sciences, said students have frequently complained about being harassed by street preachers on campus, but to no avail. Holding hands with a same-gender partner, Weiner said, “We were told we would burn in hell for our sexual immorality.”
But the university has occasionally taken action, including expelling a student in 2020 for repeatedly posting what Daniels termed “racist and despicable” statements on social media, according to the Associated Press. In one instance, the student posted a video where he pretended to run over Black Lives Matter protesters.
Daniels decided to expel the student a week after university officials announced that the posts were protected under the university’s policies.
When Daniels was named president in 2013, faculty members were largely skeptical of his ability to successfully lead a research university. They remain, along with graduate students, Daniels’s fiercest critics.
Their complaints are aimed, in part, at Daniels’s frugality. The tuition freeze has come at the expense of faculty pay and health-care benefits, they argue, as well as an increase in deferred maintenance on campus. Adjusted for inflation, the average salary for all instructional staff at Purdue increased 3 percent from 2012 to 2020, according to a Chronicle analysis, though salaries at similar research universities nationally declined more than 2 percent over the same period.
The minimum graduate-student stipend at Purdue was increased last year from $20,000 to $24,500, but a living wage would require someone to make nearly $8,000 more, said Weiner, who is a member of Graduate Rights and Our Well-Being, a group that advocates for better working conditions for graduate students at Purdue.
In April the university announced it was spending $50 million to improve pay for faculty and graduate students, calling it “the largest total investment in compensation in more than two decades.”
The other common complaint is that Daniels has violated shared-governance principles by forcing the campus to adopt a civic-literacy requirement over the objection of the University Senate, which voted against the plan. The curriculum of the program is meant to increase students’ understanding of U.S. politics and improve civic participation.
I believe his presidency has given Purdue an amount of cover from the legislature.
Undergraduates at all of Purdue’s campuses have to take one of several courses in political science or history, listen to a dozen podcasts created for the curriculum and attend six approved campus events. Students must also pass a test on civic literacy in order to graduate.
While faculty members were deeply engaged in developing the civics curriculum, the faculty senate voted against adopting it. The board approved it over the faculty’s objections, said David Sanders, associate professor of biological sciences.
“It’s a pointless exercise, meant for external consumption,” Sanders said, “almost all about dead white males who lived at the time of the Constitution.”
But even those who’ve clashed with Daniels acknowledge his popularity and civility. “He’s one of the smartest people I know,” said Sanders, an oft-quoted critic of the former president. His critiques were never about Daniels but about the effect of his policies, Sanders added. “We, for a long time, maintained a very cordial relationship.”
Stephanie Masta, associate professor of curriculum studies and another frequent critic of Daniels, said there has been at least one positive from his standing as a conservative.
“If you look at the way other red-state legislatures, they go hard after higher education, and that hasn’t happened in this very red state,” Masta said, “I believe his presidency has given Purdue an amount of cover from the legislature.”
John Underwood, Courtesy of Purdue University
Purdue’s marching band honored Daniels with his own mallet to strike the group’s giant bass drum. “That’s the sort of thing, you know, I’ll not forget,” he says.
In early December, Purdue celebrated Daniels’s accomplishments, providing a tidy encapsulation of his decade-long tenure. At a street festival, the university renamed a roadway for the departing president and Daniels took selfies with students and signed T-shirts for more than two hours. Hungry attendees could snack on cookies shaped in the likeness of the president.
At a forum titled “Freedom of Inquiry and the Advancement of Knowledge,” scholars praised the university for its commitment to free speech. Daniels also interviewed his former boss, President George W. Bush, at an event that was closed to the news media. Outside the venue, students protested.
But walking through Purdue’s student union late in the fall semester, it’s hard to find an undergraduate who said they wouldn’t miss Daniels when he stepped down. “Our student body loves him because he shows up at different events,” said Isabel Kurien, a sophomore who is studying management and international business.
Daniels has made himself accessible to students by eating with them in the cafeteria, working out alongside them in the fitness center, and sitting with them at football games. After a recent trustee meeting, the Purdue marching band assembled to honor Daniels with his own mallet to hit the group’s giant bass drum. “That didn’t get any notice,” he said, “but that’s the sort of thing, you know, I’ll not forget.”
Katilina White, a senior studying political science and philosophy, said the tuition freeze and the growth in enrollment have led to a decline in course quality and a major housing shortage. But most undergraduates don’t blame Daniels, she said, because they see him as something of a caricature — a meme-like figure whose oversized face is displayed on cardboard cutouts at Boilermakers football games.
Daniels may remain in the spotlight, but not at Purdue: He may be considering a run for the U.S. Senate next year, according to some news accounts.
In higher education, however, the focus from conservatives will shift away from Daniels both at Purdue and nationally.
Mung Chiang, the former dean of engineering, became president at the beginning of this year. Chiang is a study in contrasts with Daniels; an academic with extensive research and publications and no experience in politics beyond a brief stint at the U.S. State Department during the Trump administration.
While faculty have welcomed a president with deep knowledge of academe, they are also chagrined that the trustees appointed Chiang without any search or even interviewing him formally for the position.
Chiang won’t be entirely on his own — Daniels will retain his role as chairman of the university’s research foundation, which has been deeply involved in developing Purdue’s corporate ties. In addition, the university trustees plan to extend the tuition freeze through the end of the next academic year.
Nationally, all eyes are on Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican who resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate this week to become president of the University of Florida in February. Sasse will come to the job with far more experience in higher education than most other politicians who have sought to lead universities: He has a doctorate in American history from Yale University, taught briefly at the University of Texas, and then served as president of Midland University, in Nebraska, from 2010 to 2014.
But he is entering a job in a state where he is relatively unknown and facing backlash from faculty and students alike who raged about the process that made him the sole finalist for the position, as well as about his past criticism of same-sex marriage. Sasse has said he will try to follow Daniels’s example of eschewing partisan politics.
Daniels said he has been in touch with Sasse in recent months and has shared some advice. “I get the question a lot: ‘So, you’ve led these other lives, you know, business and government, and so what from your past experience helped you the most?’” Daniels said.
“I always start by saying, ‘scar tissue,’ right?” he said. “And I’m not being completely facetious.”
